Clifford Browder's Blog, page 51

81. Colorful New Yorkers: Battling Bella and the Queen of Mean

     This post is about two assertive women, born in the same year only twenty days apart, who became celebrities, one of whom it's hard not to like, and one of whom it's hard not to hate.

Battling Bella

Bella in 1971.     Bella Abzug (1920-1998) was New York born and bred; she looked it, sounded it, and acted it.  She was born Bella Savitsky in the Bronx, both of her parents Russian Jewish immigrants, her father a kosher butcher.  When her father died, Bella, age 13, went against tradition by saying the Mourner's Kaddish for her father, who had no son, perhaps the first of many feminist gestures to come.  President of her high school class, she went on to Hunter College and then to Columbia, where she got her degree in law.  Practicing labor law in the 1940s, she took to wearing wide-brimmed hats so as not to be taken for a secretary -- not stylish hats, to judge from photographs, but rather plain ones with the wide brim that would become her trademark.  Soon she was taking on civil rights cases in the segregated South and advocating liberal and feminist causes.  "This woman's place is in the House -- the House of Representatives," she announced in 1970, and in the following decade got herself elected to the House from Manhattan's West Side for three terms.

    When Bella hit Washington, the Old Boys' Club was jolted by a rampaging tiger.  She was soon known for her hats, her intelligence, her flamboyance, her New York chutzpah.  Not to mention her voice, which Norman Mailer said "could boil the fat off a taxicab driver's neck."  Assertive, aggressive, not given to compromise, she stepped on many toes.  "I spend all day figuring out how to beat the machine," she wrote in a journal, "and knock the crap out of the political power structure."  Always an advocate of change, she spoke scathingly of the Congressional club, the seniority system, the log-rolling and back-scratching typical of Congress.  She delighted in being one of the first, if not the first, in embracing what seemed to be radical causes: Nixon's impeachment (she was on his enemies list), getting out of Vietnam, women's rights (she was a friend of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan), gay rights, national health insurance, laws against employment discrimination.  Ralph Nader said that her sponsorship of a measure often cost it 20 to 30 votes.  And Jimmy Breslin told how during a quarrel over scheduling she punched one of her campaign workers, then phoned him the next day to apologize; "How's your kidney?" she asked.  Even so, in a survey her colleagues named her the third most influential member of the House.  And if she made enemies, she also made friends.  Said her lifelong friend Gloria Steinem, "She's fierce and intense and funny.  She takes everyone seriously.... And she's willing to change her mind."


Bella with Mayor Ed Koch (left) and President Jimmy Carter, 1978.     I never encountered Bella face to face, but my partner Bob once, quite by chance, heard her giving a campaign speech to a crowd of several hundred in Sheridan Square from a platform mounted on the back of a pickup truck.  Far from flamboyant, she was level-headed and talked sense, but with warmth; the spectators applauded with enthusiasm.  So impressed was Bob that he registered for the first time ever, so he could vote for her in the mayoral election.  Alas, she lost in the primary to Ed Koch.

     On weekends Bella returned to her residence on Bank Street in Greenwich Village to spend time with her husband, Martin Abzug, whom she had married in 1944.  A stockbroker and author, he had little interest in politics but stuck by her through thick and thin; she called him her best friend and supporter.  They had two daughters.

     In the long run her abrasive manner hurt her career.  She ran for the Senate in 1976 and lost narrowly in the primary, then ran for mayor in 1977 and lost in the primary to Ed Koch.  Other defeats followed, but she continued to practice law and worked tirelessly for women's causes.  It's not surprising that she failed to accomplish many of her goals in Congress; she was too blunt, too unsubtle, too fierce.

     "I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prizefighter, a man hater, you name it," she wrote in a journal that was published in 1972 as Bella.  "But whatever I am -- and this ought to be made very clear at the outset -- I am a very serious woman."  That she was.  If one is out of the reach of her abrasiveness, one can't help but like her.  Certainly I can't.

     In her later years Bella kept up her busy schedule of work, even though she traveled in a wheelchair.  She died in 1998 from complications following open heart surgery.  She has been inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, the site of the first Women's Rights Convention in 1848.

The Queen of Mean
This photo has been cropped; see below.
     Leona Helmsley (1920-2007) was born Leona Mindy Rosenthal in Marbletown, New York, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, her father a hatmaker.  She grew up in Brooklyn and dropped out of college allegedly to become a model, though her modeling career remains unsubstantiated.  Certainly she had business skills and an outsized ambition.  In time she joined a New York real estate firm and became a condominium broker, finally working for real estate mogul Harry Helmsley.  She was already a millionaire and twice divorced when, in 1972, she married Helmsley, who divorced his wife of many years to marry her.  From then on she worked with him to build a real estate empire that included the Tudor City apartment complex on the East Side of Manhattan, the Empire State Building, the Helmsley Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, and many other hotels in New York City, Florida, and elsewhere.

The Helmsley Palace Hotel, now the New York Palace Hotel, on Madison 
Avenue.  In the foreground is the Villard Mansion, built by railroad magnate 
Henry Villard in 1884.  Behind it is the 55-story tower built by Harry 
Helmsley.  The hotel combines the two.Americasroof
     A lackluster millionaire before the marriage, Helmsley's life was sparked up afterward.  He and Leona moved into a ten-room duplex with an indoor swimming pool atop their luxurious Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, but soon also acquired an estate in Connecticut, a condo in Palm Beach, and a mountaintop hideaway near Phoenix, not to mention a private hundred-seat jet with a bedroom suite so they could gad about in comfort.  Leona is said to have had a minimum of twelve pictures of herself in every room of her residences.  She gave lavish birthday parties for her husband ("my pussy cat, my snooky, wooky, dooky"), and on her own birthday her snooky floodlit the Empire State Building with her favorite colors at a cost of $100,000 ("Less than a necklace," said the pussy cat).  As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, "The rich are different from you and me."
     I recall lavish ads for the Palace Hotel showing her, dressed in the height of fashion and crowned with a tiara, inspecting her troops, the hotel's uniformed employees, with the caption "The Queen stands guard."  Indeed she did, being a demanding and tyrannical monarch.  A friend of mine was once interviewed for a job with her as chef, and was warned by the interviewer that he would have to be available 24/7, in case Mrs. Helmsley planned a dinner for seventeen at 2 a.m.; he didn't get the job because "your personality would not meld well with Mrs. Helmsley's."  When she took her early morning sessions in her swimming pool, a more compatible liveried servant was on hand with a platter of fresh-cooked shrimps; at the end of each lap she would command, "Feed Mama," and he would hand her a shrimp.  But her anger was fierce.  Discovering a wrinkled bedspread, she shouted, "The maid's a slob!  Get her out of here.  Out!  Out!"  And a lawyer friend who once breakfasted with her has told how, when a hotel waiter brought him a cup of tea with a tiny bit of water spilled in the saucer, she grabbed the cup from him, smashed it on the floor, and made him get down on his hands and knees to beg for his job.  No wonder she came to be known as the Queen of Mean.
The uncropped photo, her mug shot upon
her arrest in 1988.  The most radiant mug
shot I've ever seen.  After her conviction
she looked less radiant.     All this changed in 1988, when U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani (the future mayor) brought charges against the Helmsleys for evading federal taxes by illegally billing the expenses of remodeling their new mansion in Connecticut to their hotels as business expenses.  Harry Helmsley's deteriorating health led to a court ruling that he was mentally and physically unfit to stand trial, so Leona faced the charges alone.  At the trial her arrogance and greed were amply demonstrated, and a former housekeeper testified that she had once told her, "We don't pay taxes.  Only the little people pay taxes."  She denied having said it, but it was consistent with her character.  When I heard that statement, I knew that the IRS would nail her, and sure enough, in August 1989 she was convicted on numerous charges that included conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion.  While she sobbed quietly in the courtroom, her lawyer pleaded with the judge not to make her serve time in prison, which might endanger her health.  The judge was adamant, but her attorney was able to get a reduced sentence, and she was ordered to report to prison on the day federal taxes are due, April 15, 1992.  She was released on January 26, 1994, with 750 hours of community service to perform.

     Was she sobered by her time in prison?  Had she changed?  She had always insisted that she had done no wrong, that she was targeted because she was a woman.  Assigned to a hospital in Arizona to do community service, she was required to stuff envelopes and wrap presents for volunteers to give to the patients.  There she complained that the staff "gawked at her" and were "less than charitable," so the court permitted her to do the service at home.  But the judge soon learned that she had assigned much of it to her servants and so added another 150 hours of service.
     As a convicted felon Leona Helmsley couldn't run enterprises with liquor licenses, so she had to give up managing the hotels.  When her husband died in 1997, she said, "My fairy tale life is over.  I lived a magical life with Harry."  Estranged from her grandchildren and with few friends, she lived alone in her lavish apartment atop the Park Lane Hotel with her Maltese dog, Trouble.  Her face was now frozen into a scowl by multiple face lifts.  When she died of heart failure in 2007, she left the bulk of her fortune to a charitable trust, and $12 million to Trouble, this last being ranked third in Fortune's "101 Dumbest Moments in Business"; the bequest was later reduced by a court to $2 million.  She and Harry are buried in a luxurious Greek-style mausoleum with stained-glass windows in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County.  Trouble, the richest dog in the world, died in December 2010, her every need seen to around the clock, and watched over by a full-time security guard because of death and kidnapping threats.  Her keeper had spent $100,000 a year on her care.

The Helmsley Mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
     Did Bella and Leona ever meet?  Not to my knowledge.  If they had, it would have been epic.  I can't imagine them hitting it off.  The Queen of Chutzpah vs. the Queen of Mean -- how the fur would have flown!

     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Who makes money when America goes to war?  New York, 1861-1865 (with glances at today).  Next Wednesday, Colorful New Yorkers: Diamond Jim and Texas Guinan, but with Jim's pal Lillian ("Luscious Lillian") Russell and her famous hour-glass figure thrown in.  In the works: the Titan of the Met, who claimed to have a heart of stone, and an aristocrat of the people who, like Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, believed that money should be spread around like manure in order to make things grow.


©  2013  Clifford Browder

80. Famous New York Streets: Broadway

     Broadway, the most famous street in New York City, running fifteen miles through Manhattan and the Bronx, was once an Indian trail and then, with the coming of the Dutch, the main thoroughfare in the settlement of New Amsterdam.  The Dutch named it the Heere Straat (the Gentlemen's Street or High Street) or Breede Weg, and when the English took over, they translated the latter as "Broadway."  It still runs the length of Manhattan crazily at an angle, defying the gridlock pattern of the city's streets decreed by the city fathers in 1811.

     In New Amsterdam the Heere Straat went from the fort that gives the Battery its name up to a gate in the wall that gives Wall Street its name.  Right from the first, it teemed with a mix of peoples: Dutch, English (including refugees from the rigors of Puritan New England), Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Frenchmen, Bavarians, Poles, Italians, Walloons, Bohemians, Jews, Africans both slave and free, and Munsees, Montauks, and Mohawks, most of them coming in hopes of a freer, fuller life.  One visitor reported eighteen different languages in the settlement, and they would all have been heard on Broadway.

New Amsterdam in 1660.  The Heere Straat is clearly shown, as is the fort at the Battery.
      In the eighteenth century Broadway witnessed one of the most significant events in our history: Washington's triumphal entry into the city on November 25, 1783, following the evacuation of the last British troops and, with them, some 28,000 Loyalist refugees and many former slaves whom the British  had liberated.  The city was the scene of Washington's worst defeat in 1776, following which it had been occupied by the British.  Washington and his officers entered from the north and proceeded down Broadway to the Battery, to the cheers and applause and waving hats and handkerchiefs of onlookers.  Though ticker tape was absent, it could be considered the first of many parades of heroes on Broadway.  For years afterward, November 25 was celebrated as Evacuation Day.

An 1879 lithograph of Washington's entry.
      Now we'll fast-forward to the nineteenth century, the period I know best.  The city of circa 1830 was still small enough that the gentry knew, or knew of, almost everyone who mattered; for all its  ongoing changes, their world was ordered and safe.  Few people kept carriages, and those who did were known to everyone.  One of these was Dandy Marx, a dashing young blade whose clothing  defied the somber colors of the day as he drove four handsome chestnuts down Broadway, bearing with perfect nonchalance the sneers and jealousies of others.  Another familiar sight was Dandy Cox, a mulatto driving a spirited horse to a light wagon where he sat perched high on his seat, his well-brushed beaver cocked at an angle, his green jockey coat displaying polished brass buttons, his leather gloves spotless, imitating -- if not mocking -- the fashionables of the day.

     But in those days almost all the men worked, so that the fashionable promenade of Broadway, which went from the Battery to Canal Street, was mostly given over to belles and their mamas for shopping.  One of the few male interlopers was Gentleman George, a neat, trim, tastefully dressed young man who drove a stately gray with aplomb.  Where does his money come from? the men of the town wondered, while mothers eyed him with suspicion, well aware that their daughters were casting furtive glances his way, intrigued by this timid but respectful young man whom they so often met on their morning strolls.  Gossip about him saved many a tea party from dullness.  George was seen and puzzled over for years, until at last he disappeared into the city's rapid growth and expansion, a mystery to the end.

Broadway and Canal Street, 1834.  Busy, but not jammed.
     The sidewalks of Broadway also offered a few eccentrics who stood out and occasioned comment.  The mad poet McDonald Clarke was seen there in a tattered cloak, his unbuttoned "Byronic" shirt collar a sharp contrast to the primly buttoned shirts of most males, his melancholy gaze always fixed on the pavement, another mystery figure whom women found strangely appealing.  Also familiar was the Gingerbread Man, a harmless lunatic in a swallowtail coat who jog-trotted up and down the avenue as if on a pressing errand, his only sustenance a seemingly endless supply of gingerbread stuffed in his pockets that he was constantly consuming.  One day he failed to appear, was never seen again.  Another regular on Broadway was the Lime-Kiln Man, a tall, gaunt figure, his unkempt hair and thin face smeared with lime, who took no notice of the looks of pity he garnered, another mystery man about whom nothing was known.  In time  he was found dead in a lime kiln where he had slept at night for years.

     The society of those days, though quite conformist, tolerated a number of oddballs because they were familiar and posed no threat.  What people were leery of was the blatant display of wealth, which was deemed vulgar.  Elegance was allowed, and the women of New York were famous for dressing in the height of fashion, and even the black underclass could be surprisingly chic, but the elegance had to be quiet and discreet.  All this was visible on Broadway.

Broadway, 1860.     Now we'll fast-forward again to the 1860s, by which time everything had changed.  Irish and German immigrants had flooded in since the 1840s, the city had become a metropolis, Wall Street was now the money center of the nation, the Civil War had permitted gold speculators and war contractors to amass a fortune, and New Money was blatantly in evidence everywhere.  Ever since Central Park had opened in 1859, its Drive had become the preferred promenade of the affluent, who drove there in elegant equipages, so that Broadway was now essentially commercial.

     And what did one see on Broadway?  Red and yellow and blue-painted stages, open and closed carriages with liveried footmen, drays, wheelbarrows, hacks, milk carts with clattering cans, horsemen, lager beer wagons, express trucks stacked high with boxes labeled ASTOR HOUSE or ST. NICHOLAS HOTEL, and a wagon hauled by six straining horses conveying the towering bulk of a safe as big as a house.  And all this traffic emitted a deafening roar, as it sliced through the mud of the street, until it jammed up amid shouts, curses, and whinnyings, and maybe the shriek of a coachman being beaten by a truckman for not giving way.  With no stoplights or stop signs, how was a pedestrian to get from one side of Broadway to the other?  Without the help of a policeman, you were risking your life.  Furthermore, in wet weather the thoroughfare was ankle-deep in mire, while in dry weather it was caked with teeth-gritting, breath-choking dust.  And always, in whatever weather, being embellished with garbage and manure, it stank.

      What enterprises did this tumultuous thoroughfare offer?  Barbershops, liquor stores, lottery offices, daguerreotype galleries, artificial teeth manufacturers, sewing machine and piano forte showrooms, plain and fancy jewelers, oyster cellars, clam chowder shops, bookstores, boots and shoes, billiard table stores, ice cream parlors, gambling dens.  But there were also princely hair-dressing establishments for gentlemen, emitting whiffs of menthol, musk, and cologne; fancy dry-goods stores with uniformed doormen; palatial marble-fronted hotels; and, guaranteed to astonish visitors from the provinces, sidewalk displays of patent sarcophagi in rosewood, mahogany, and iron, satin-lined with silver mountings, featuring glass-paneled lids to display the face of the deceased.  Then as now, in New York one could obtain anything and everything.

     Pigs rooting in garbage on the side streets sometimes joined the throngs along Broadway where, in the morning rush to work, purposeful top-hatted merchants in starched collars rubbed elbows with dusty sideburned laborers, pallid clerks, and ginghamed working girls, while ragged newsboys hawked their papers, and workmen loaded or unloaded carts and toted boxes.  Later, hordes of elegant lady shoppers would appear, as well as gangs of barefoot boys and girls mouthing obscenities, and sandwich men flaunting fore and aft in bold lettering RADICAL CURE TRUSSES, POCAHONTAS BITTERS, or PHILIPOT'S INFALLIBLE EXTRACT.  For everyone went to Broadway, rich and poor, respectable and otherwise; it was the principle thoroughfare, the main artery, the commercial hub of New York.

     On Broadway the kings of the road were the whip-cracking stage drivers who, mounted high on the box of their stages, drove as fast as traffic permitted, shaving lampposts and shrieking oaths at anyone or anything in the way.  Their patrons grumbled about the ill-ventilated interiors with twin unpadded benches, where up to a dozen passengers sat facing one another amid smells of onion, sweat, and tobacco, as the stages lurched ungently ahead over cobblestones.  Passengers were expected to drop the exact fare in a box with a slit in the top, which the driver, glancing down from his seat, could verify, and God help anyone who failed to pay, since the resulting comments from the driver would be, to put it mildly, scathing.  A champion of the drivers was Walt Whitman, who, seated beside them,  often rode the whole length of Broadway listening to their yarns.  He described them as "largely animal -- eating, drinking, women," but esteemed their comradeship, good will, and honor, and credited Broadway Jack, Balky Bill, Pop Rice, Patsy Dee, and a host of others with influencing the gestation of Leaves of Grass.

     But what did the old timers think of all this?  Remembering the tranquil days of their childhood, they were dazed.  The jam of people and vehicles on Broadway overwhelmed them, and if they stood at an entrance to Central Park and watched the showy equipages heading for the Drive, they had no idea who these promenaders were or where their money came from.  Gone was the discretion of an earlier time; New Money paraded its wealth brazenly.  Engulfed by this mass of strangers, these relics of a simpler age felt small, mere atoms lost in the city's never-ending flux.

     Change, often radical, was the rule in the Never-Finished City.  By the mid-1870s buildings were rising to eight, ten, and eleven stories high, provoking mixed reviews: a new dimension to space, said some; top-heavy horrors and "Towers of Babel," said others.  Broadway had been the first New York City thoroughfare to get gaslight in the mid-1820s, and now it was the first to be lit with electricity.  On December 20, 1880, the whole stretch of it from 14th Street to 26th Street was suddenly bathed in brilliant light; observers gaped and raved.  And in 1879 the first telephone exchange opened, with the first phone directory listing all of 252 names.  Businesses rushed to adopt the new gadget, but at first it was much too costly for use in private homes.

Broadway in 1885, looking north from Cortlandt and Maiden Lane,
with wires crisscrossing overhead.
     Telephone and telegraph wires now crossed and recrossed each other from the tops of buildings, darkening the sky over Broadway with what seemed like meshes of a net.  Worse still, overburdened  wires had a way of snapping and falling to the street, with potential peril to anyone in the vicinity.  Then in 1889 a lineman working overhead was electrocuted on a wire gridiron in the heart of the business district; thousands watched as the body dangled for nearly an hour, its mouth spitting blue flame.  The enraged public now demanded that the wires be put underground, and the corporations involved finally, after long delays, complied.

     The advent of the automobile in the 1890s marked another major change for Broadway. The first recorded motor vehicle fatality in the United States, and indeed in all the Americas, occurred in New York, though not on Broadway.  On September 13, 1899, Henry H. Bliss, a New York real estate salesman, was getting off a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West, when an electric-powered taxi struck him and inflicted fatal injuries; he died the next day.  A plaque commemorating the incident was placed at the site on the centennial of his death, a mortality that can be seen as ushering in the twentieth century.  The first traffic light was not installed in New York but in London in 1868, but in 1916 New York installed the first three-color stoplight at its busiest intersection, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.  That the location chosen was not Broadway shows that by now Broadway was not the single most significant thoroughfare in the city.

     By the early twentieth century it was electricity that gave the midtown section of Broadway, the section from 42nd to 53rd Street also known as the Theater District, the name "The Great White Way."  The streetlights alone justified it, but the advent of neon signs in Times Square confirmed it.  This is still the Theater District, though most of the theaters are on side streets nearby, and Times Square today, especially at night, is more astonishing than ever.  (Forty-second Street, by the way, merits its own history; once a tawdry porn center frequented by drag queens and hustlers, it has been scrubbed up and Disneyfied, a change that is praised by some and lamented by others.)


Jorge Láscar
     Broadway today on the Upper West Side is a wide avenue with a thin strip of park down the middle.  Back in my student days I loved walking down from Columbia to some restaurant or movie theater on Broadway, and traipsing it at night always lifted my spirits.  This stretch of Broadway was not constricted by tall buildings as it was downtown; it was big, open, and free  -- New York at its best.

     I have omitted many sections of Broadway -- Madison and Herald Square, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center -- but if I include them, this post will become a history of the city.  So I'll sign off now, acknowledging that Broadway, no longer the single jammed artery of the city, is still a vital part of it, a symbol of it, busy, colorful, exciting.

     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, the first of a series on colorful New Yorkers: Battling Bella and the Queen of Mean.  Older New Yorkers may pick up on these designations; younger ones and out-of-towners may not.  But they are very New York, very colorful, and well worth a look.  Next Sunday, Who makes money when America goes to war? (1861-65, with a glance at today, including a delicious photo of Dick Cheney).  Also: the Mad Poet of Broadway and the Mephistopheles of Wall Street; Diamond Jim (who owned a mere 12,000 diamonds), and his pal Lillian ("Luscious Lillian") Russell.  Why "luscious?  Wait till you see her posing on her bicycle!  Also: Texas ("Hiya, suckers!") Guinan, who after a night in the slammer remarked, "I like your cute little jail, and I don't know when my jewels have seemed so safe."  Also the Broadway gossip columnist who imposed a reign of terror (can you guess?).  And maybe I'll set foot -- just a little way -- into the hallowed precincts of the Stork Club.  New York is inexhaustible.


©  2013  Clifford Browder

79. Tweed at the End: "I have tried to do some good."

     At the elections of November 1871 the enraged reformers triumphed over Tammany, with one exception: William Marcy Tweed was reelected state senator.

     The Boss had already been arrested in a civil suit to recover stolen money, but had provided bail at once, with one million coming from Jay Gould, and so avoided jail.  The Committee of Seventy, strengthened by its victory at the polls, then sought indictments of all those implicated in the courthouse and other graft, prompting an impromptu flight of Tammany stalwarts and cronies in all directions out of the city of New York.  James Ingersoll, the millionaire furniture maker, and James Sweeny, the brother of the Squire, were reported to be refugees in Paris.  Andrew Garvey, Grand Marshal of Tammany Hall now also known as the prince of plasterers, was spotted on a ship bound for Germany, where the prince mistook a pilot coming on board for a policeman and, like a true son of Tammany, tried to bribe him, whereupon the indignant pilot threw the money overboard to the laughter and applause of onlookers.

     Other targets of investigation announced a sudden and intense need of vacation and vanished.  State Senator Henry Genet, known to many as Prince Hal, was so indiscreet as to remain within reach of the law, and was tried and convicted of fraud.  But old friendships survive the vicissitudes of politics.  Sheriff Matt Brennan delayed turning him over to the Tombs, and one Sunday Prince Hal and his custodian, a deputy sheriff, observed the Sabbath by roaming the city's bars and getting drunk.  Ordered to appear in court the next day with his prisoner, Brennan came alone, explaining that he had allowed Genet time to go home and arrange his affairs, which evidently required extensive traveling.  The result: Brennan got thirty days in jail and Genet a protracted vacation in Europe.  Peter Barr Sweeny, the Squire, left for the wintry clime of Canada to seek his health, later joining his brother in Paris, and the well-named Slippery Dick Connolly was tried and convicted, albeit in absentia, since he had fled abroad with six million dollars to finance his international wanderings.

     Two prime targets of the reformers remained.  Mayor A. Oakey Hall ("O. K. Haul" in the Nast cartoons) stayed to face charges, and in the three ensuing trials the supposed popinjay, rendered ridiculous in the Nast cartoons with his beribboned pince-nez perched on his nose, proved to be an effective defense attorney for himself, gay, witty, and charming, then caustic or tearfully melancholy, and always the soul of innocence.  Yes, he had signed some 39,257 vouchers as mayor, but, having "an ineradicable aversion to details," had had neither time nor inclination to read them all and was unaware of any impropriety.  One trial ended with the death of a juror, another with a hung jury, and the third and last with an acquittal.  But the Elegant Oakey was not done yet; triumphant, he wrote a play about a man accused of stealing that was done on Broadway with none other than the ex-mayor himself in the lead.

     Also on hand, standing his ground "like a Roman," as his lawyer asserted, was William Marcy Tweed, who had aged considerably.  At his first trial in January 1873 he was defended by a brilliant team of lawyers, and the jury disagreed.  Friends advised him to decamp, but he refused to, confident that he would be acquitted.  At his second trial in November 1873 the jury did indeed find him guilty of no less than 204 counts in the indictment.  Sentenced to twelve years in prison and a fine of $12,750, he was sent to the county penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, but the court of appeals reduced the sentence to a year and a fine of $250.  Released in January 1875, he was immediately arrested on a civil action brought by the state to recover $6 million of the Ring's alleged theft, with bail at the unheard-of amount of $3 million, and when he failed to provide this amount, he was sent again to prison.  The reformers, led by the ambitious Samuel J. Tilden, the state's newly elected governor, were determined to make an example of him.

     But Tweed still had friends in high places.  Confined to Ludlow Street Jail, most of whose inmates were debtors imprisoned by their creditors, he took frequent afternoon rides in a carriage accompanied by two turnkeys, and on the way back stopped off at his home for dinner.  On December 4, 1875, while the two turnkeys sat in the parlor, he snuck out the back door of his home and disappeared.  Immediately a reward of $10,000 was offered for his capture, and over the next few weeks he was reported to be in Savannah, Dallas, Havana, London, and elsewhere.  Just who helped him escape and where he lay in hiding he never disclosed; he was probably hiding nearby in New Jersey.  Soon, shorn of his beard and wearing a wig, he made his way by boat to Santiago, Cuba, and from there to Vigo, Spain, where the former state senator and Grand Sachem of Tammany arrived disguised as a common sailor busy scrubbing a deck.  Alerted to be on the watch for him, the Spanish authorities identified him with the aid of a Nast cartoon and, unable to read English and thinking him a kidnapper, arrested him and with great pomp handed him over to the crew of an American frigate dispatched specially to take him into custody.

     A broken man in failing health, the ex-boss wanted only to die peacefully at home, and hoping to obtain this offered the authorities the only thing still his to give: an elaborate confession, backed up by  canceled checks.  But Governor Tilden had no interest in prosecuting the many others involved in Tammany fraud, some of them judges, legislators, and upstate mayors; he wanted only to scapegoat Tweed.  Attorney General Charles S. Fairchild interviewed Tweed in his Ludlow Street Jail quarters and promised him his freedom in exchange for testimony against Peter Sweeny, who had returned from France in hopes of avoiding prison by arranging a settlement with the authorities.

     Months passed with no further word from the authorities; in time it became clear that Fairchild would not approve his release.  Tweed suffered several heart attacks, and Luke Grant, his black servant, never left his side at night, sleeping on the floor by his bed.  Sometimes, unaware that the Boss was reading his Bible, Luke would burst into song and provoke from Tweed an outburst of profanity.  But then Tweed quickly made amends.  Learning that Luke was in love, he dictated Luke's letters to the girl, using the fanciest words he could think of; the girl was mightily impressed.  

     Visitors came daily, found Tweed comfortably lodged in a two-room suite with blooming plants on the window sills, and a table with several books, including an open Bible, but the windows had steel bars.  Tweed's memory for faces was unimpaired; staring out a window at people passing in the street, he could name almost all of them, state their occupation, and say something about their family.

     Slowly he declined, complaining of more pain in his heart; obviously the end was near.  When his heart pained him, Luke pillowed his master on his own breast and massaged his heart to relieve the pain.  A married daughter and her husband, the deputy warden, and a few loyal friends came; other family members were abroad.  Luke was in tears.  "I have tried to do some good," said the dying man, "if I have not had good luck.  I am not afraid to die."  When his breathing became labored, with great effort he gasped, "Tilden and Fairchild -- they will be satisfied now."  He closed his eyes, the room was oppressively silent.  Suddenly the great bell in the nearby Essex Market tower pealed high noon like a thunderclap, and he was gone.  Luke was on his knees, clasping his master's lifeless hands and sobbing.

      The funeral was held at his daughter's house; only one politician of note attended.  But a throng of  poor people gathered outside in the street, remembering his generosity, a job of some sort, a fiver when they were in desperate need, a load of coal to see them through the winter.  After the service they were invited in to view the coffin: men in rough clothing, women in calico with market baskets, several blacks, several men with dogs; they were quiet, respectful, orderly, as they took a last look at the Boss, his hair and whiskers snow-white, his face like chiseled marble.  Many accompanied the cortege all the way to Greenwood in Brooklyn, where he was buried beside his mother.  Though he looked much older, he was only fifty-five.

      For a fair appraisal of Tweed and Hall, one has to shake off the image of the Nast cartoons, which is easier said than done.   Some of the reformers in later years decided that Hall may well have been guilty only of negligence, nothing more.  As for Tweed, whatever his faults were, his ending can only inspire sympathy.  He was being used by the powers that be for their own purposes, and in so doing they failed to honor their promise to him.  (He himself had always kept his word.)  Whether his confession was reliable, or perhaps exaggerated so as to curry favor with them, can be debated.  Whether there even was a tight-knit "Ring" of four -- Tweed, Hall, Sweeny, and Connolly -- has been questioned, though the fact of colossal graft seems undeniable.  Tweed had been a superb politician; it is a shame that he didn't use his talents more constructively.  But Samuel Tilden played his hand well, becoming first governor and then, in 1876, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, winning the majority of the popular vote but finally losing to Rutherford B. Hayes in the electoral college (a mysterious institution that most citizens don't understand, and that some are even sublimely unaware of).

A self-caricature of Nast, sharpening his pencil to
draw a cartoon.
     Thomas Nast has been hailed as the most successful political cartoonist in our history.  Besides helping the Times bring down Tweed and his cronies, he is credited with popularizing the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant, and Santa Claus as the jolly, plump, red-faced figure that we conceive of today.  A German-born immigrant, he had all the virtues and vices of the WASP, portrayed the Irish as monkey-faced animals or drunken thugs, and  Roman Catholicism as a dangerous subversive force trying to gain control of our youth.  But contrary to some accounts, the word "nasty" does not derive from his name; "nasty" was around long before he was.

"The usual Irish way of doing things," a Harper's 
Weekly cartoon of 1871 by Nast.



"The American River Ganges," a Harper's Weekly cartoon of 1875 by Nast, showing Catholic
bishops as crocodiles.  In the distant background, Saint Peter's basilica topped by a cross, and
closer, in the center, a public school with the U.S. flag flying upside down, a signal of distress.     One Tammany figure who did succumb to the reformers was Justice George G. Barnard, whose propensity for diamonds, cards, brandy, frilled shirts, and profanity was proverbial, and who presided over his courtroom with his boots propped up on the desk before him, while whittling away at pine sticks that the attendants kept him supplied with.  In 1872 he was impeached by the New York State Assembly on charges of unjudicial conduct, including fraud and corruption, and was removed from the bench and barred from holding any public office in the state.  After that he was rarely seen in public, but to friends in private he expressed his bitter grief.  He died in 1879 at the age of forty-nine.

     It would be encouraging to say that the reformers, having destroyed Tweed and his alleged "Ring," put an end to corruption in New York, but such was not the case.  In the words of George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany stalwart of a later date, reformers were "mornin' glories -- looked lovely in the mornin' and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin' forever, like fine old oaks."  Tammany Hall withstood many onslaughts by reformers, always survived, and dominated New York City politics well into the twentieth century.

Plunkitt, in a shiny top hat, seated at his preferred rostrum,
the bootblack stand outside the County Courthouse.  (Yes,
that courthouse, known today as the Tweed Courthouse.)
     And who was George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924)? you may well ask.  He was a veteran Tammany politician who served at various times in both houses of the state legislature, but who today is best remembered for his impromptu talks on politics delivered from the bootblack stand of the New York County Courthouse, expressing candidly the views of a machine politician who thought the civil service system heralded the downfall of the U.S. government.  Needless to say, he believed in patronage and spoils, saw no need for reform.

     Some of his sayings are memorable:

Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.  There's all the difference in the world between the two.There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works.  I might sum up the whole thing by sayin', "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."This city is ruled entirely by the hayseed legislators at Albany.There's only one way to hold a district; you must study human nature and act accordin'.The Irish was born to rule, and they're the honestest people in the world.You hear a lot of talk about the Tammany district leaders bein' illiterate men.  If illiterate means havin' common sense, we plead guilty.Make the poorest man in your district feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you.  Above all, avoid a dress-suit.Tammany's the most patriotic organization on earth, not withstandin' the fact that the civil service law is sappin' the foundations of patriotism all over the country.  Nobody pays any attention to the Fourth any longer except Tammany and the small boy.
    As an "honest" grafter, he made a fortune by buying up land that he knew would be needed for public projects.  His world was small -- even Brooklyn was terra incognita for him -- but he did know the world of Manhattan politics and is a must-read for anyone interested in Tammany and its ways.  His talks were recorded in William L. Riordon's Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, first published in 1905 but available in more recent editions.

     Today the Tweed courthouse, the focus of so much graft, serves as the headquarters of the Department of Education.  Once disparaged as a colossal boondoggle costing more than the purchase of Alaska, it has been carefully restored and is now recognized as a landmark of note.  A striking example of Victorian neoclassical style, to my eye it is downright handsome.


The Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street today.  The rotunda is not visible in this photo.  The huge building in the left background is the Municipal Building.
Interior of the octagonal rotunda.
























Staircase, west wing.

























     Note on WBAI:  It's not quite as bad as I thought.  The national and international news, coming from a different source, continues, and they have brought back the English-language news of Al Jazeera.  But the city-based local news is gone, and that's serious enough.

     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Famous New York Streets: Broadway.  The first of a series of posts on streets; other possibilities being Wall Street, Fifth Avenue (and its poor cousin, Sixth), and the Bowery.  And more posts on colorful New Yorkers: Texas Guinan, the Queen of Mean, the Mad Poet of Broadway, the King of Gossip (can you guess?), and others.  And war profiteering, then and now.

©  2013  Clifford Browder

78. The Hercules of Parks

     The Verrazano Bridge, its graceful span linking Brooklyn and Staten Island ...

                                                                                                    Roger Wollstadt

... Lincoln Center, that amazing complex of cultural institutions, its structures and fountain coming magically alive at night ...


                                                                                                            Nils Olander

... the United Nations Headquarters, looming dramatically close by the East River ...

                                                               Ad Meskens


                                                                                 R.Sullivan



... Jones Beach on the south shore of Long Island, with its broad expanse of sand and elegant bathhouses, accessed by a landscaped six-lane parkway with the Jones Beach water tower soaring in the distance ...

















... the massive looming structures of Co-op City, the vast housing complex beside the Hutchinson River in the Bronx ...


                                                                                                                                                                                 Sacme


... and countless other parks, beaches, throughways, housing projects, and playgrounds in and about the city -- all this and more, much more, is the work of one man, said to be the world's greatest builder since the pyramid-building pharaohs of ancient Egypt.  And many of his works bear his name.























Moses with a model of his proposed
Brooklyn-Battery Bridge.     Robert Moses was just a name to me, until I read his biography (see below).  Then I realized that his works are all around us, that New York City's character and history are inseparable from the story of Robert Moses, a man whom I have never had any contact with and whom I wouldn't have wanted to know, but a giant in the history of this city.

     I have said that all these achievements were the work of one man.  This reminds me how Bertolt Brecht, when he encountered a statement like "Caesar conquered Gaul," would comment, "Really?  All alone?"  Of course Moses had assistants -- a whole army of them -- and allies.  But he was the initiator, the innovator, the guiding spirit of these projects, and without him, few of them would ever have been realized.

     Robert Moses (1888-1981) pursued his public works projects under six New York State governors and five New York City mayors, all of whom found in him an invaluable ally and a formidable opponent, but one that they could not do without.  He more than anyone shaped the city of New York; his achievements are everywhere in the city today, as well as throughout Long Island and in upstate New York.  Ambitious, impatient, and arrogant, he gave his life to public works projects, was always burning up with new ideas that he was determined to realize.  And early on he learned that dreams, no matter how vast and dazzling, were not enough; one must have power to make them happen.  So he learned to acquire power and use it.

     Consider a few of his achievements:
In the 1920s, when state parks were unknown throughout most of the country, with Governor Al Smith solidly behind him he created 40,000 acres of state parks on Long Island, linking them by landscaped parkways to the city, thus setting an example for other states to follow.In a mere two years he transformed a desolate sandbar on the south shore of Long Island into the vast sandy expanse of Jones Beach, with elegant bathhouses, a boardwalk, a restaurant, and parking lots accommodating tens of thousands of cars.As Park Commissioner under Mayor La Guardia, using thousands of laborers in one year he refurbished every park in the city, removing litter, painting structures, planting trees -- an accomplishment that astonished the press and the public.In Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx he used landfill to join Hunters Island and Twin Islands to the mainland and transformed skimpy little Orchard Beach into a mile-long crescent with gleaming white ocean sand dredged up off the Rockaway beaches and brought in by barge.He completed the Triborough Bridge, a huge project comprising four separate bridges linking three boroughs and two islands, thus creating the first direct link between the Bronx and Queens, and making Long Island and its parks accessible from the city.As part of his West Side Improvement plan he transformed Riverside Park in Manhattan from a mass of mud and dirt into a lush green park free at last of the New York Central tracks and their smoke-belching engines, which he covered over and so made disappear.As part of that same grandiose plan, he created the West Side Highway, built the Henry Hudson Bridge to carried it over the Harlem River into the Bronx, and continued it north to the city line, linking it up with the Saw Mill River Parkway and so at last giving the city a convenient outlet to the north.He was also responsible for the creation of Lincoln Center, the United Nations Headquarters, Co-op City, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, and the New York Coliseum, as well as 416 miles of parkways radiating out from the city into the suburbs, and a massive power dam across the Saint Lawrence River.
     Is it any wonder that for forty years the press and public idolized him as the Hercules of Parks, a zealous and fearless achiever who sought only the public good, free from any political considerations?  And that he himself, immune to modesty, was sure that he would be blessed by future generations, that his works would make him immortal.
     How did he do it?  How did he cope with governors and mayors and bosses, and even at times with presidents?  How could he do anything in a city whose bureaucracy, second in size only to the federal government's, has been described as a huge spongy mass into which good intentions and noble projects sink, never to be seen again?
     The answer is: through power, sometimes blunt and naked, sometimes veiled and discreet, but always and unmistakably power.  He functioned for years as Park Commissioner, Construction Coordinator, and member of the City Planning Commission.  But his greatest power lay in the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, whose board he dominated.  An authority is a strange creature not fully understood by the public (myself included).  It has powers akin to those of a large private corporation and even, to some extent, the powers of a sovereign state.  Unlike a public agency, it needn't show its books to the public, and Moses never did, so no one knew what the authority's revenues were (and they were vast), or how Moses used them.  
     Essential to Moses' power was the praise of press and public, a mighty weapon to wield against critics and reformers who challenged him; throughout his career he cozied up to newspaper owners, editors, and reporters.  But if press and public adored him, it was because he delivered.  He drove his architects and engineers hard, pounded his fist on his desk, demanded quick results.  Those who couldn't take it quit, but those who remained were fiercely loyal, convinced that this was more than a job, that their work really mattered and would greatly benefit the public.  The result: fourteen-hour work days, and when plans for a project were urgently needed, all-night sessions with short naps at intervals on cots that Moses thoughtfully provided.  The only one who could drag him home was his wife; if she showed up, he surrendered instantly and ended the day's work.  But politicians were soon telling one another, "That Moses fellow, he gets things done!"  And nothing so pleases politicians at election time as some new park or highway or bridge that voters can make use of and enjoy.
     Discretion was not his thing; in dealing with public officials he was ruthless.  Unknown to the public, to get his way he used not only charm, bribes, and legal loopholes and technicalities, but also threats, insults, lies, even character assassination.  He once shouted over the phone at Governor Thomas E. Dewey that he was a stupid son of a bitch and hung up.  But his greatest weapon of all was the threat to resign; so necessary was he to mayors and governors, they surrendered instantly.  
     But this was not enough.  When the law empowering the Triborough Authority was amended in 1938, Moses snuck into the text hidden clauses that gave him still more power and made it practically impossible for him to be removed.  He could now issue bonds, acquire land, retain tolls, and hire and fire unrestricted by civil service regulations.  No one realized at first how the amendment had made him practically invincible, but when challenged, he could refer critics to such-and-such a clause, rendering them powerless.  Moses was henceforth independent of mayor and governor, city council and legislature alike.
     The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was now his fiefdom and private empire with its own flag and great seal; its own laws and regulations; a self-contained communications network; a fleet of yachts, cars, and trucks; a uniformed army of bridge and tunnel officers responsible only to him; a steady source of revenue from bridge and tunnel toll booths -- as high as $213 million a year, far more than what was needed to maintain its operations; and hundreds of skilled architects, engineers, contractors, and developers -- "Moses men" -- whom he often made millionaires.  Favored secretaries had bigger cars and higher salaries than city commissioners, and round-the-clock chauffeurs so they could be on call twenty-four hours a day.

     The monarch presiding over this private empire had no less than four offices, one on Randall's Island in the East River, one in the old August Belmont mansion on Long Island, and two in downtown office buildings.  Adjacent to each office was a luxurious dining room where Moses could wine and dine visiting dignitaries lavishly.  At Randall's Island invited guests would be ushered into an anteroom whose walls featured photographs of Moses with various presidents; at the Belmont mansion the anteroom's walls were covered with plaques and trophies honoring the host.  White-coated waiters served drinks, and a Moses aide would appear to regale the guests with stories of his boss's triumphs.  Finally Moses himself would appear, followed by a suite of eight or ten aides.  The doors to the dining room would then be thrown open and Moses would lead the guests inside, where the aides would be seated on his right in seats prearranged in order of rank and favor in his eyes. (From week to week, observers could tell who was up, who was down.)  As for the quality of the food served, guests spoke of it afterward in tones of awe.

     In the Moses empire these lunches were almost routine.  But whenever a new dam or park was opened upstate, chartered planes flew hundreds of guests to a whole weekend of lavish celebrations well covered by the press.  Such affairs won Moses more praise and respect, but he was taking no chances.  He also hired investigators ("bloodhounds") to create files on local officials so as to keep them in line; if lavish entertaining didn't do the trick, blackmail would, and he didn't hesitate to use it.  All of which reminds one of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI; Hoover too presided over a private empire through many administrations, kept files on public officials, and used blackmail to get his way.  Hoover's operation was more far-reaching, involving national affairs as it did, but in the domain of public works Moses had just as much power and used it just as ruthlessly.  But even the Hoover comparison falls short.  How about Louis XIV at Versailles?

Al Smith greeting crowds during his ill-fated
1928 campaign for the presidency.  The face --
hearty, coarse, open -- shows him to be Moses'
opposite.  Al Smith was too wet, too Irish, too 
Tammany -- in short, too New York -- to win
a national election.     The governor he most admired and felt closest to was Al Smith, his polar opposite.  Born in New Haven, Moses grew up in comfortable circumstances, a secular Jew who later converted to Christianity.  He was well bred and well educated, a graduate of Yale who did postgraduate work at Oxford.  Al Smith was a Tammany man from the streets of New York, an Irish Catholic with little education, harsh-voiced, blunt, uncouth.  But both were fighters, and both wanted to accomplish things that would benefit the citizens of New York.  So Smith backed Moses completely in his battles with local municipalities and robber baron landowners as he created a vast system of parks and parkways on Long Island in the 1920s.  To settle one ongoing dispute about a proposed appropriation by Moses on the south shore, Smith summoned Moses and several landowners to a conference, so he could hear both sides.  When one of the landowners explained that they didn't want to be "overrun by rabble from the city," Smith looked at him coldly and replied, "Rabble?  That's me you're talking about," and signed the appropriation form on the spot.

     The next governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, differed vastly from Smith.  A patrician and upstate landowner with an old and honored name, he was smooth, educated, urbane, WASP to the core, subtle, devious, and vindictive.  He and Moses disliked each other intensely, but he couldn't remove Moses from his park posts and soon realized that he needed Moses, a man who got things done.  So they developed a working relationship that continued when Roosevelt became president.

La Guardia addresses the citizens on the radio.
     Another prima donna that Moses had to deal with was Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York (1934-45) through the bleak Depression years and beyond.  Cocky, truculent, impulsive, and ambitious as well, the mayor was not the easiest man to get along with, but he was a champion of the have-nots and of public works, and like Smith and Roosevelt could see that Moses got things done.  In private Moses referred to the Little Flower as "Rigoletto," and La Guardia called him "His Grace."  Strong-willed and hot-tempered, they tangled often, but they also admired each other and shared the dream of making New York City beautiful.  But in time the mayor came to realize -- too late -- that the man he had made Park Commissioner had acquired too much power by far.

    
     Slowly, over time, Moses' accomplishments began to be appraised more critically.  He built new parkways on Long Island to relieve congestion on the old ones, but the result was congestion on the new and old parkways alike.  The Triborough Bridge was soon clogged with traffic, but the old East River bridges remained congested as well; Moses' proposed solution: build another bridge.  But the city planners gradually came to realize that the more facilities you provided for vehicular traffic, the more traffic there would be.

     Increasingly, Moses ran rough-shod over the mounting protests of reformers and preservationists.  In building the West Side Highway he put it right through Inwood Hill Park, destroying much of the last virgin forest in Manhattan, instead of putting the highway along the edge of it, as the park's defenders urged.  In the Bronx his highway destroyed as well a once tranquil residential neighborhood in Riverdale, and cut right through Van Cortlandt Park.  I have hiked in both those parks and can testify that it is hard to find a spot in their leafy expanses free of traffic sounds, where one can experience silence with only the faint sounds of nature. 
     Moses' projects were in fact not meant to benefit all the citizens, but only the affluent middle class with cars.  (Which is why many of his achievements are beyond my carless reach.)  All the Long Island parks had huge parking lots, but could not be accessed by people without cars, because Moses vetoed a proposed Long Island Railroad spur to Jones Beach, and made sure that the parkway overpasses were just low enough to block passage of city buses.  He had no interest in small parks for the slums, and of all the hundreds of playgrounds he built, only one was in Harlem, where playgrounds were most needed.  Clearly, he didn't share Al Smith's affection for the "rabble," whom he saw as dirty and unruly.  In the name of "slum clearance" he was quite willing to drive thousands out of their homes into overcrowded slums elsewhere or into areas that would soon become slums.  He destroyed neighborhoods and flooded the city with cars by building highway after highway, while starving the city's subways and suburban commuter railroads.  For every improvement he made, there was a high price to be paid, though that price was often hidden from the public.

     Rarely, Hercules was stymied.  In 1941 he proposed a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge that would have ravaged Battery Park, one of the few spots in Manhattan affording a fine glimpse of the harbor.  Many forces combined to resist the plan, preferring a tunnel, but he would not compromise.  Finally his opponents appealed to the Roosevelts, and the President got the War Department to declared a bridge vulnerable to air attack in wartime, which settled the matter; the tunnel was built, and not with him in charge.

     This rare defeat enraged him.  The Roosevelts were beyond his reach, but he could and did attack the preservationists by suddenly announcing that old Fort Clinton (formerly Castle Garden), a circular sandstone fort at the Battery completed in 1811, and the city Aquarium it housed, were structurally unsound (a dubious assertion) and therefore slated for demolition.  Generations of New Yorkers had been taken to the Aquarium as children, and had in turn taken their children there, so the place was enshrined in their memory.  The fort was preserved by transferring it to the federal government, but the Aquarium was indeed demolished: an act of pure spite.  Only in 1957 would the city get another Aquarium, a fine installation that my partner Bob and I have visited many times, but located in distant Coney Island, so that those without cars could only reach it by a long subway ride through Brooklyn.  I mean no disparagement of Brooklyn, but it's quite a journey -- the main sight I recall being the stellar beauty of the Gowanus Canal -- in order to witness walruses and seals.

 Fort Clinton and, within its walls, the old Aquarium.
On the right, a fire boat.   
     Another fight developed in April of 1956, when a mother sitting on a bench in a tranquil glen just inside Central Park between West 67th and 68th Streets noticed some men nearby with surveying equipment and blueprints.  Leaving for lunch, the men left their blueprints spread out on the ground, and the mother, stooping to look at them, saw their title: "Detail Map of Parking Lot."  So it was discovered that Park Commissioner Moses was planning secretly to destroy the glen -- a quiet, shady spot where little children loved to play -- so as to build another parking lot for the Tavern on the Green, the pricey nearby restaurant he had created in 1934 as a part of his Central Park renovation.  Local opposition immediately materialized, with a petition signed by 23 mothers sent to Moses, with a copy to Mayor Robert Wagner.  Having just completed the Coliseum, Moses, then at the height of his power, saw this fuss over a small parking lot as trivial.  He determined to proceed as usual in such situations by starting the work of demolition at once, thus rendering any opposition futile.

     Early one morning another mother looked out her window and saw a bulldozer starting to tear out the roots of trees in the glen.  Within minutes 30 to 40 mothers were rushing to the park with pets, kids, and baby carriages in tow.  The bulldozer operator, finding his path blocked, halted the demolition.  A policeman came, then patrol cars, then five newspapers, and seven radio and five TV stations.  Momentarily stymied, Moses sent the bulldozer back twice, but was always blocked by the mothers.  MOMS  VS.  MOSES  and  FIGHTING  PARK  MOMS  blazoned the press.  For the first time in thirty years, Moses' ruthless tactics were evident to all, and in a battle against mothers with young children who wanted to save a slice of the city's beloved Central Park.  Moses was now more Goliath than Hercules.  Nothing daunted, Goliath sent uniformed park employees by night to erect a fence around the glen, then brought in the bulldozer, guarded by police who held the mothers off, when they discovered what was happening.  The press went wild, calling Moses a bully and sneak, while flaunting photos of weeping mothers and falling trees.  Moses was now seen as a destroyer, not a defender, of parks.  Yet when Mayor Wagner got nearly 4,000 letters of protest in a single day, he declined to intervene.

     For the first time ever, Moses was facing opponents who were sophisticated and media-savvy, well heeled and well lawyered, opponents who knew how to play the game of protest.  A court injunction soon stopped the demolition, and stories appeared in the press about the Tavern's high prices, its customers arriving in chauffeur-driven Cadillacs, and Moses' cozy arrangement with the restaurant's owner, who quite legally paid the city a pittance for his lucrative concession.  Faced with an ongoing barrage of criticism, Moses retreated as gracefully as an autocrat can, agreeing to build a playground instead of a parking lot in the ravaged glen.  MOSES  YIELDS,  MOTHERS  WIN  screamed the press.  Moses' legend as the Man Who Gets Things Done was still intact, but with flaws: he obviously reveled in power, was neither infallible nor incorruptible.  From then on, his name was linked to the bulldozer.

Moses' nemesis.  That firm jaw says 
it all: stubborn, determined, ruthless.     Moses' rule was further threatened by a growing movement for neighborhood preservation, as opposed to massive projects causing thousands to be displaced, and by an increased awareness of the importance of public transportation, subways and buses as opposed to highways.  But his nemesis proved to be Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York (1959-73), who, planning the Empire State Plaza in Albany (see post #18, July 2012), fancied himself a builder on the scale of Moses himself, and who, for all his surface charm, was just as arrogant, stubborn, and ruthless.  State employees were required by law to retire at age 65, but could get extensions from the governor, and over the years Moses got many.  In 1962 Rockefeller suggested to Moses, then almost 74, that he resign from one of his many posts so the governor's brother Laurence could have it.  True to character, Moses threatened to resign from all of them -- a ploy he had used for decades -- and stormed out of the meeting.  When Rockefeller phoned him, Moses, confident that he had won, refused to take the call, then sent the governor a letter repeating his threat of resignation.  To Moses' surprise, Rockefeller, professing regret, accepted all the resignations, stripping Moses of most of his power.  This time no public outcry resulted; the man was, after all, in his seventies.  Concealing his chagrin, when Moses saw the governor at a bridge dedication two weeks later, he threw his arms around his enemy, who hugged him back in turn.

     Moses was still chairman of the board of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, but in 1968 Rockefeller proposed to merge that authority with the newly created Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which would place greater emphasis on mass transportation.  Since the governor promised to make Moses the head of it, Moses didn't oppose the merger, as he might have with a good chance of success.  But once the merger had been completed, the governor offered him only a post as consultant, which would let him keep his limousine, chauffeurs, and secretaries, but without any exercise of power.  Humiliated, Moses, now 79, accepted what was really just a face-saving gesture.  After 44 years of power, he was shorn of it.  

     Moses had trouble adjusting to his new situation.  He still had his Triborough office, but his memos to the MTA chairman were answered by underlings or ignored, and promised jobs never materialized.  He was a consultant whom no one consulted.  His mind was still active, but he watched in dismay as his beloved parks deteriorated, and little housing and no highways were built.  In time, speaking invitations and mail dried up.  His former lieutenants reported now to other superiors, were allowed little contact with him.  His pride kept him from showing his bitterness in public, but bitterness there was.  Robert Caro's lengthy biography, The Power Broker, published in 1974, did further damage to his reputation, showing his ruthlessness and scheming.  By now Moses knew that Rockefeller and the MTA were waiting for him to grow too feeble to pester them, were waiting for him to die.  In 1981 he did.

     Moses' legacy is debated to this day, the dazzling accomplishments versus the price the city and state had to pay.  He was an autocrat, but history suggests that great achievements are the work primarily of autocrats.  The Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the network of roads binding the Roman Empire together, the palace and gardens of Versailles -- all were the work of autocrats.  It seems unlikely that New York City and State will ever again see an autocrat of Robert Moses' stature, and just as unlikely that any one builder will ever achieve what he did.  He dreamed big and got things done -- a myriad of things all around us that we can see and use and enjoy.  The lengthy proceedings involved in the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site -- proceedings that have dragged on for years -- he would never have tolerated.  Democracy has many fine things about it, but getting big things done quickly and efficiently seems not to be among them.  I mourn the loss of woodlands and tranquility in Inwood Hill and Van Cortlandt Parks, which his throughways have sliced up savagely, but I am dazzled by Lincoln Center at night.  Should I hate Robert Moses or love him?  Maybe a bit of both.

 Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power
Station, Lewiston, N.Y.
Busfahrer Robert Moses State Parkway.
TwinsMetsFan

































Robert Moses State Park, along the Saint Lawrence 
River.  Another park named for him is on Fire Island.
Matthew Trump

















      Source note:  For much of this post I am indebted to Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, an interminable but fascinating opus that treats its subject exhaustively and exhaustingly, but fairly.  The author, having done an amazing amount of research, commits the fatal sin of biographers by not leaving enough of it out.  The book should have been cut by a third; even the paperback edition is ponderous.  But for all that, it is a rich and informative read, showing not just Moses and his ways, but how things get done -- or not done -- in this city, how men of power use one another and the public, how this crazy city sort of works.

     Wienie update:  It's amazing the attention that mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner continues to get, even after collapsing in the polls.  Last Sunday's Review Section in the Times had no less than two substantial articles about him, and he is often mentioned on the radio.  And a more recent Times article noted his and fellow sinner Eliot Spitzer's continued popularity among black voters, attributing it to two things: black churches' emphasis on forgiveness, and the frequency with which black leaders have been accused of similar indiscretions.  And why do I persist in publishing these wienie updates?  First, my waggish sense of humor can't resist.  Second, it's an ongoing New York story, and that's what this blog is all about.  And third, morbid curiosity.

     WBAI terminal?  WBAI is in such dire financial straits that it has terminated its award-winning evening news program and the whole news staff, the last program having been last Friday.  This amazes me, for I thought that time-honored program would be the last to go.  Now I have no reason to listen to the station in the evening, since most of what they're now doing is pleading for donations.  Their news program made me aware of issues neglected or ignored by the mainstream press.  When I mention ALEC and the Transpacific Partnership to friends, or tell them Monsanto is the company I love to hate, they don't know what I'm talking about.  Where now will I get such information?  WBAI professes to being optimistic about continuing, but in the light of this cancellation I have to wonder.  If you jettison one of your most significant and listened-to programs, does that mean the station is terminal?  I hope not, but I can't help but wonder.

     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, Tweed at the End: "I have tried to do some good."  Next Sunday, Famous New York Streets: Broadway.  In the works: Colorful New Yorkers (the Queen of Mean, Texas Guinan, the Mad Poet of Broadway, and others), and a look at who made money in New York in the Civil War (three kinds of profiteers), plus a search for their equivalents today.

©  2013  Clifford Browder

     

77. Thomas Nast and the Power of the Pen

     When the New York Times accused Boss Tweed and Tammany of “monstrous abuses” and called them “reckless plunderers,” the Boss scratched an ear, shrugged: they had no proof; besides, his constituents couldn’t read. But some were hungry; asked for a donation for the Seventh Ward poor at Christmas, he wrote a check for five thousand dollars. “Oh Boss,” said an alderman half in jest, “add another naught.” He did, making it fifty thousand.

     When he first heard that some artist in Harper’s Weekly was drawing pictures of him and his pals and had labeled them a Ring (“true as steal”), he didn’t give the scribblings a glance. But when friends thrust at him a drawing by Thomas Nast that was now the talk of the town, he looked, winced:

A workman in a garret receiving a notice of eviction, while in a garden Tweed and his cronies sprawl on a bed of roses and swill champagne, Connolly and Sweeny looking crafty and sinister, Mayor Hall a prancing little fop with pince-nez, and the Boss flaunting a paunch swollen to immense proportions and adorned with a sparkling diamond. “The rich grow richer.”

     The Tammany leaders had been made to look contemptible and ridiculous, yet shrewd and sinister: the brilliant renderings of an artist sparked by rage.

     A week later a lawyer called on Nast at his home. Since the gentleman had talent as an artist, some unnamed patrons would stake him to a study tour of Europe to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars. Asked Nast, a short, stocky man with a trim mustache and goatee, pointed nose, and quick, keen eyes, 
Thomas Nast     “Can I get two hundred thousand?”

     “Certainly.”

     “A half million?”

     “For sure. Take the money, go.”

     Nast wiggled his nose, grinned. “I think I’ll stick around.”











"Let us prey."
      Dismissing the lawyer, he went back to his board, picked up his pointed pencil and steel pen:
Tweed as a bloated vulture, diamond stickpin intact, with taloned cronies, perched on the bones of the city. “Let us prey.” 

















      In July, while the slums baked and festered, a select hundred of the Tammany stalwarts retired for long weekends to the Americus Club and its wooded shoreline estate in Connecticut, where the Boss hoped to initiate the boys into clean-cuffed wining and dining and gentlemanly disport. Rising from sheets of blue silk and white lace, they donned the club uniform of blue navy pantaloons with a gold cord running down the side, a blue navy coat, and a white vest and white navy cap – the whole outfit further enhanced by a membership badge of a gold tiger’s head on a relief of blue enamel, with (for those who could afford it) eyes of blazing rubies. All talk of politics was banned. At the members’ disposal was a magnificent well-staffed clubhouse (dubbed the “Hotel de Tweed”) with billiard rooms, pool rooms, card rooms, a dining hall and kitchen, a barbershop, a well-stocked bar, and a library with plush armchairs and shelves of finely bound books that betrayed few signs of wear. The boys lingered through a ritual of meals, played pool and billiards under gaudy frescoes in rooms with mantels of Italian black marble adorned with imported bronzes, and eyed lazily a fleet of twenty rowboats in the harbor and the steam yacht William M. Tweed.

      Some of the members actually went rowing or sailing; all yearned for a rare invitation to visit the palatial yacht, where the Boss hosted a chosen few amid oriental rugs, tables set with sterling silver, and for large parties even an orchestra. Everyone was welcome at the annual clambake held on Tweed Island, a rocky bit of land a hundred yards from shore, where guests slurped a savory chowder accompanied by claret and champagne. The chowder had never been tastier, the drinks more sparkling, the Boss more chipper and blithe, his whole three-hundred-pound frame pulsing with laughter when someone told a joke. This was living!

      One morning while the Boss was reclining in the club barbershop, having his beard clipped and his scant locks slicked with oil, they brought him a New York Times that blazoned from stolen secret ledgers the expenses of the new county courthouse on Chambers Street: “Thermometers,” seven thousand dollars; “Brooms, etc.,” forty-one thousand; “Plastering,” close to three million; “Carpentry,” well over four.  "TAMMANY ROGUES" proclaimed the Times, while heaping scorn on the contractors: G.S. Miller was "the luckiest carpenter in the world," and Andrew J. Garvey "the prince of plasterers."  Given in telling detail, the figures were so outrageous that the shock and wrath of citizens exploded as far as Connecticut.

      Half cropped, half scented, Tweed rushed back to the city to be met by reporters at the station. “Is it true?” they demanded, goading him until his nostrils stung, and he glared out of deepset eyes:

      “Well, what are you goin’ to do about it?”

      These words (instantly regretted) were quoted all over town. At his drawing board at home, Nast, in shirtsleeves, eyeing a photograph of Tweed, whom he hated for his bullying bulk, his lips’ smug curve, and the sly look in his eye, dipped his pen in ink:

Tweed’s vast frame spreading boldly, hands in pockets, with a dollar sign for a head: The "Brains."















      Solid citizens flocked to Cooper Union. Republicans and Democrats alike, they denounced the Tammany frauds, and to cries of “Hang them!” formed a Committee of Seventy to wrest the city from the Ring. Cheers; talk of vigilantes.

      The Boss had never shown fear; at a meeting once, when an enemy jabbed his gut with a pistol, he had faced him down unblinking. But this was different: morality, scattered in droplets for years, had suddenly congealed in a mass. When he glanced at the latest cartoon – Tweed and his pals in a circle, each one pointing to the next: “Who stole the people’s money? ’Twas him” – his ruddy tint paled, his stomach clenched. But could these puny moralists in tight collars really yank him down – he who was muscled and blooded like an ox, and more than anyone, knew and loved the city, from its spired and porticoed monuments to the ankle-deep gore of its slaughter pens, the stink and shit of its sewers?

Front row from left to right: Tweed, Peter "Brains" Sweeny,
Slippery Dick Connolly, Mayor A. Oakey Hall.  These four
constituted the alleged Ring, "true as steal."
      The Committee of Seventy petitioned the courts for an injunction to prevent the city government from raising or paying out funds. The petition was put to Justice George G. Barnard, Tweed’s chum, the white-toppered, whittling dandy of Gotham. Money was the blood of the tiger; without it, no henchman could be soothed or flattered, no voter coaxed. With a solemn air Barnard banged his gavel, granted the injunction: astonishment.

      In his Duane Street office Tweed took his goldheaded cane topped by a Tammany tiger and beat his desk five times. How could that brandy-reeking clown, that insect whom he had plucked from the mire to a pinnacle, do this to him? Rumors flitted: he had been promised the governorship. Barnard governor? Preposterous! But Barnard didn’t think so.

      Elections were approaching. On the street where Nast lived, thugs were seen watching his house. Quickly, Nast sent his family to friends in New Jersey. Then, rising in the middle of the night, his brain hot, his ink-stained fingers nimble, he sketched feverishly:

Tweed feasting, Tweed smiling, Tweed towering, Tweed gloating; the whole city squashed under Tweed’s huge thumb.

      In shops and newsstands citizens clutched for the Weekly, whose circulation had tripled. The Boss they saw pictured there was fat, sly, evil, gross.

      “Them damned pictures … ” Alone in his office, William Marcy Tweed leafed through his file of cartoons, pounded them, hurled them, yearned to shout that Bill Tweed, big and loose as the city, was a friend to all, meaty, juicy, warm. But twist and wiggle as he might, he knew that others viewed him locked in the mold of the Boss.

      “Bill,” said his friend Jim Fisk, “don’t let them galoots of reformers rattle your old tin oven!" But when he dined out the duckling had lost its savor, the ale its tang. Feeling clumsy and crude, he started burning records in his office, transferred real estate to one of his sons.

      One week to the election. Sleepless, gaunt, obsessed, Nast chewed his pencils, drew:

From his box in an arena, Tweed as a Roman emperor, smug, monstrous, watching the bleeding Republic, a prostrate virgin, ripped by a snarling tiger.  "What are you going to do about it?"


      Having always loved his country, the Boss raged, almost wept. “They need me!” he bellowed. “I make this city work!”

      Even before the election they arrested him.


     Source note: This post, like the earlier one on Tweed, draws on both primary and secondary sources. Some of the dialog is fictional, but the characters and events depicted are all true to historical fact.

     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, The Hercules of Parks.  (Never heard of him?  If you live in the city, his works are all around you.)  Wednesday, August 14:  Tweed at the End: "I have tried to do some good."  (Who did him in, and who was loyal.)  Newly in the works:  Who makes money in wartime?  New York, 1861-1865.  (Contractors, speculators, bounty brokers.  And a glance at today.)

©   2013   Clifford Browder

76. How America Goes to War: 1861, New York

     That New York City went to war in 1861 surprised many in the South and even some in the North, for the city had strong commercial ties to the South, and its merchants dreaded war.  In the event of war, Southerners had predicted, "Grass will grow in the streets of New York," for how could the city  survive without the South's business, and above all without its cotton?  Also, the drawl of Southern planters was well known and most welcome in New York, for the Southern genty used to escape the worst summer heat by coming north with their families to spend time here doing business and shopping, before going on to Saratoga for several weeks, and coming back to wind up their business and return to the South.  So as Secession loomed, the city's merchants had advocated compromise with the South, and Mayor Fernando Wood, the slickest and deftest of politicians, had even proposed that the city secede from the North, so as to maintain its ties with the South.  (Not the last time the city dreamed of going it alone.)  `But all that changed in April 1861, when newspaper headlines broke the news:  THE  WAR  COMMENCED,  WAR  AT  LAST.  The South had opened fire on Fort Sumter; it was war indeed.
     I have read about and witnessed several beginnings of war and noticed certain phases common to all of them:Patriotism raised to a fever pitch.Celebration of heroes real or manufactured.Demonization of the enemy.The sobering up.Let's see how these played out in New York in the spring of 1861.
Patriotism raised to a fever pitch
     When news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached the city on Friday night, April 12, it spread quickly.  All the next day newspaper offices were thronged by crowds eager for newspapers and the latest news.  People gathered at every corner where news bulletins were posted, and the presses printed extras as each new dispatch came in by telegraph.  When the President called for 75,000 three-month volunteers, majors and colonels proliferated overnight, opening rolls for enlistment, and tents soon sprang up at the Battery, and barracks in City Hall Park.  "'Tis sweet, oh 'tis sweet, for one's country to die," sang fresh-faced volunteers, while multitudes scuffed their voices on the Star-Spangled Banner, and preachers preached, "Beat your ploughshares into swords!"  Lawyers and boilermakers shouldered arms and tramped in ragged parade, schoolboys drilled in schoolyards, and 1812 veterans tottered forth, yearning to serve their country yet again.  When the elite 7th Regiment of the National Guard drilled in its armory, hundreds flocked to watch, admission by ticket only; it had been ordered to Washington.
     There was a great demand for flags, streamers, and bunting.  Flags appeared in store windows, on church steeples, on ships in the harbor, in lapels and the fronts of men's hats, in ladies' bonnets, even in the fists of infants and the manes of horses.  On Monday, April 15, a noisy crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside the offices of the New York Herald, whose owner, James Gordon Bennett, was thought to be partial to the South.  While they stared up at the newspaper's windows and hooted and jeered and demanded that it fly the flag, a committee of gentlemen called on Bennett and warned him that not flying the flag would put his paper and perhaps himself in danger.  Bennett, a cynic immune to lofty causes and the surge of sentiment, agreed to do so, but in point of fact had no flag handy to fly.  Finally one was obtained that, in the absence of a flagpole, was hung out a window, to mixed groans and cheers from below.  Meanwhile the Times and Tribune, ardent supporters of the President, were flying huge banners atop their offices.

     Other papers deemed insufficiently patriotic were similarly threatened, as were hotels once graced by the drawl of Southern chivalry; in every case flags were conspicuously displayed.  In all these situations the police followed the crowd discreetly, so as to prevent any violence.  As well they might, since an effigy was found hanging in City Hall Park with a placard in bold letters: ROPE  ALL TRAITORS, and another was seen hanging by its neck out a window on a downtown street with a sign proclaiming, EVERY  TRAITOR  SHOULD  BE  SERVED  THUS.  More than one citizen who expressed, or was thought to have expressed, sympathy for the South or disloyalty to the President was pummeled and felled in the street.  Small wonder that the Herald staff were said to be armed, and to have pumps ready to throw boiling water on any mob attacking their building.

     And the ladies?  They were in it up to their ears, adorning themselves with flags and bunting, cheering volunteers as they drilled, and evincing a most passionate fondness for uniforms.  At a party a young woman asked her fiancé if he was going to volunteer.  "Do you really want me to volunteer and get killed?" he asked.  Springing up from her seat, her eyes flashing fire, her cheeks flushed, she announced, "If you are a coward and dare not fight for your country, you are not the man for me!"  So if young men flocked to volunteer, they weren't inspired by patriotism alone, but also by the awareness that, to cut a shine with the girls, you had to be in uniform.

     Support for the military came from surprising quarters.  RADWAY'S  READY  RELIEF  was touted in a long ad in the Times as appropriate for every man in the Army or Navy to allay inflammation, prevent mortification in case of gunshot wounds, and prevent the need for amputation.  It was also a cure for malarious fevers, dysenteries, rheumatism, and other maladies.  A retired Colonel Gates of the U.S. Army was quoted as saying that he would no more think of retiring to bed without a bottle of it than to go into battle without his sword.

      On Friday, April 19, the 7th Regiment marched down flag-bedecked Broadway on its way to Washington, shouldering rifles with bayonets, while a huge crowd of spectators greeted them with cheers and tears and cries of "God bless them!"  Mothers watched discreetly from the back windows of closed carriages drawn up on the curbstones, while others watched from windows or rooftops, and boys scaled lampposts, trees, and fences for a better view.  Other regiments would soon follow, including Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's Fire Zouaves in red shirts, gray baggy pants, and blue overcoats.  A regiment of volunteers from the slums impressed the diarist George Templeton Strong as being a "desperate-looking set."  They danced with delight on receiving revolvers and bowie knives, and weren't the least bit put off by reports that a secessionist mob in Baltimore had attacked a Massachusetts regiment en route to Washington: "We can fix that Baltimore crowd!  We boys is sociable with pavin' stones, too!"

The Fire Zouaves, recruited from the city's firemen, march down Broadway en route to Washington.
     Then, on Saturday, April 20, over one hundred thousand citizens gathered at Union Square for the largest patriotic rally the city had ever seen.  There were speeches from five stands, and lesser spiels from front stoops, carts, and windows, as city officials, rescued from franchise scandals and complaints about manure in the streets, stood brisk and square, flanked by braided generals, as out of the mouths of orators poured acclamations: "Divine Providence ... Constitution ... flag insulted ... Christian civilization ... sacred independence ... freedom against oppression ... God."  Rippling through the sea of waving flags were prayers and resolutions, plus cannon booms and cheers.


The rally in Union Square.  One detail seems inaccurate: the flag flying from the George
Washington statue, supposedly from Fort Sumter, seems remarkably intact.
Celebration of heroes real or manufactured


     No need to manufacture a hero, as New Yorkers had a real one when Major Robert Anderson, the Fort Sumter commandant, arrived in the city from Charleston on April 18 with his beleaguered garrison and its battle-shredded flag.  The 5th Regiment marched to the Brevoort House to salute him, and he appeared on a balcony to cheers.  The next day, when the 7th Regiment paraded down Broadway en route to the capital, Anderson appeared again on a balcony and was again received with cheers.  At the April 20 rally in Union Square he was hailed yet again with tremendous roars from the crowd, and the flag, now a patriotic symbol for the North, was flown from the equestrian statue of George Washington.  The flag was then taken from city to city for patriotic rallies and fund-raising efforts for the war, and on April 14, 1865, four years to the day after the fort's surrender, it was raised again by Anderson, now a major general, over the battered remains of the fort.


     Another hero was Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who on May 24, 1861, one day after Virginia's secession from the Union, was ordered with his Fire Zouaves across the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia, where a large Confederate flag was flying above the Marshall House Inn.  The occupation was unopposed, but when Ellsworth went to the Marshall House and cut down the flag, the hotel's owner, James Jackson, killed him with a shotgun blast to the chest, and was immediately himself killed by a corporal accompanying Ellsworth.  Ellsworth's body was taken to the White House, where it lay in state, and was then removed to the City Hall in New York, where thousands came to view the first man to die for the Union cause.  "Remember Ellsworth!" became a patriotic slogan.




     Heroes -- and heroines -- are sometimes in short supply and have to be invented.  In Iraq in 2003, Private First Class Jessica Lynch was wounded and captured when her convoy was ambushed by Iraqi forces.  Initial press reports described her as a hero who fought the enemy ferociously before succumbing to wounds and being captured.  The aura around her only increased when, soon after, she was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by U.S. Special Operations Forces.  Returning to the States, she was appalled to learn of the reports about her in the press.  She later testified before Congress that she had never fired her rifle, which had jammed, and that she was knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed.  Asked about her heroine status, she insisted, "That wasn't me.  I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do.  I'm just a survivor."  For her honesty alone perhaps she deserves a medal.

      Another case dates from the Philippines in December 1941, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack plunged us into war and we were desperate for heroes.  On December 10 Army Air Corps pilot Colin P. Kelly's B-17 bomber was sent on a mission to attack Japanese naval forces off the coast of Luzon.  Sighting a large warship that they identified as the battleship Haruna, his crew dropped three bombs that they believed hit the target and destroyed it.  When the plane was returning to base, it was attacked and badly damaged by a Japanese fighter; Kelly remained at the controls so his men could bail out, but he himself did not survive.  He was hailed as America's first hero of the war, but his story was exaggerated and garbled.  Many Americans thought he had crashed his plane into the Haruna and destroyed the ship, for which he received posthumously the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor.  In fact he received the second highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and after the war it was learned that the Haruna was not even in the area and that no Japanese ship had been sunk.  Kelly was nonetheless a hero, having sacrificed his own life to let his crewmen escape.

Demonization of the enemy

     As hostilities heated up, George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary that "these felons," meaning the Rebels, had murdered Northern wounded in cold blood as the Northern forces fell back.  So began the demonization of the enemy.  As the war dragged on, these rumors would only increase.  Sober leading citizens would assert that the Rebels bayoneted the wounded, dug up the remains of a brave officer so they could cut off his head and burn his flesh to ashes.  They were said to have stripped the Northern dead of their uniforms and left them naked on the field to be devoured by dogs or to rot.  They reportedly even boiled the flesh from the bones of the dead and then from those bones made ornaments for themselves and their friends, or for sale in the markets.  Reliable witnesses, it was claimed, had confirmed these stories, which were then included in a report to the Senate.  Today we can voice skepticism about these charges, but in point of fact both sides on occasion committed atrocities, including at times violating and dismembering corpses.  "War is hell," General Sherman famously remarked after the war.  But reports of atrocities during a war should be received with skepticism, even though some of them may indeed be confirmed in time.



A man you'd love to hate, but to our
democratic eyes a bit ridiculous.


     America has been lucky in its choice of enemies, many of whom lent themselves to demonization.  How could you not hate the fiercely mustached Kaiser, posing in bemedaled uniforms under a spiked or eagle-topped helmet?  Even before we entered World War I, British propaganda had his troops hanging up children by their thumbs and slicing the breasts off women in Bleeding Belgium.  Hitler too was easily demonized, and postwar revelations only confirmed his monstrous guilt.  Saddam Hussein was similarly vilified, nor have we had to date any good reason to rehabilitate him.  But in the Civil War such figures as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson could not easily be demonized, and today the latter two are admired and eulogized even in the North.  There were monsters back then too, and on both sides, but rarely at the top levels of command.




















Even forest fires could be linked to Hitler and Tojo.

    Many of our enemies have been militarists and tyrants, and, taking themselves very seriously, are vulnerable to caricature as well.  If demonization paints your enemies as the direst of threats, caricature makes them ridiculous.  Hitler and the Kaiser were easily caricatured, but with Hideki Tojo, the Japanese wartime premier, cartoonists had a field day -- not without a touch of racism -- making him toothily grotesque.  But caricature has its limits, for one laughs at its victims, whereas war demands that you see them as demons you can hate.






 The sobering up

      "On to Richmond!" Horace Greeley's Tribune urged, as the blue-coated ranks headed south.  For weeks afterward cannon were trundled through the city's streets, bunting makers toiled, and hoopskirted ladies in front parlors sewed nightcaps for soldiers, while in the kitchen their maids did the same.  Letters arrived reporting that the boys had been assaulted by mosquitoes and flies.  "On to Richmond!" exhorted Mr. Greeley, fretting at the front's calm.

    Then, on July 22, came stark tidings: the Northern legions had been trounced by the Rebels and stampeded from the field in disgrace, along with a panicky horde of sightseers -- politicians and their wives, who had come out to picnic and watch the battle -- the rout going almost to the gates of Washington.  Shame spread throughout the city, resolve tightened.  Wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary: "We are not yet fighting in earnest.  Our sluggish, good-natured, pachydermatous people need much kicking to heat its blood.  Not a traitor is hanged after four months of rampant rebellion.  We have got to hang rebels, arm the niggers, burn their towns."  More volunteers were called for, anthems sung, bounties offered.

     Weeks stretched to months, to a year.  In the city screaming factory saws hewed out gunstocks, while nurses in hospitals put white gauze on splotches of gore, and artificial legs were advertised.  Mindful of daguerreotypes of uniformed loved ones on the whatnot, grim-faced, the ladies stitched and knitted.  It was going to be a long war.


     The last war where these phases were clearly displayed was World War II, and the sobering up then came quickly, given the initial Japanese victories throughout the Far East, and the toll taken by enemy submarines off both our coasts.  Since then we have been involved in undeclared wars that the public could not embrace wholeheartedly, and that often did not end in clear-cut victory.  Even in World War II there was more grim determination than patriotic fervor, a mood far different from the intense patriotism of World War I, which my parents told me of, including an account of a young man so ashamed of being rejected by the services that he often kept to the alleys of Indianapolis, rather than be seen on the street.  Nor did the slogans of World War II match in fervent idealism those of the previous war, as for instance "Make the world safe for democracy" and "The war to end wars."  Maybe we've learned something along the way.  Maybe.

A World War I recruiting poster,
just as relevant for World War II. A demonized Germany wading
through a sea of dead bodies.






















     Personal note:  When news of Pearl Harbor came to my hometown, Evanston, Illinois, the city fathers at once placed a guard around the water works, lest Tojo and his perfidious legions corrupt our water supply.  Unlikely, but why take a chance?  Fortunately, no Japanese submarines were reported in the placid waters of Lake Michigan.  But one dissident escaped the authorities' notice: my father, an unrepentant isolationist, whose loathing of the President knew no bounds, and who even insisted that FDR was just a bit loony.  In Great Britain he would probably have been jailed for defeatism or undermining the nation's morale.  (But that's another story.)

     Bank note:  My beloved bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, has just settled a charge of manipulative scheming bought by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, paying $410 million, and has plans to settle other cases as well.  Talk about hitting a man when he's down!  That poor bank is still reeling from the loss of $6 billion -- or was it $8? -- in a bad trade some months back.  If it has to pay additional  hefty fines, how can it continue to offer free candy and pens at my branch?  And at the same time comes news that giant drug maker Pfizer has settled a marketing case with the Justice Department for $491 million!  Doesn't the government realize that corporations are the essence, the lifeblood, the very soul of our society?  Let the government fight its wars and regulate beekeeping, but leave these noble institutions alone.

     Wienie update:  What's to say?  Mayoral hopeful Weiner won't quit, he's still at it.  So the voters will decide.

     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, Thomas Nast and the Power of the Pen (a cartoonist with a savage pen becomes the nemesis of Boss Tweed).  Next Sunday, the Hercules of Parks (about the world's greatest builder since the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, his rise, his fall).


©  2013  Clifford Browder

75. Boss Tweed: How About a New Sewer?

     This post is the first of three about Boss Tweed, the first of the big city bosses.  Tammany Hall, founded in 1789, was the Democratic political organization that dominated New York City politics well into the twentieth century.  By the mid-nineteenth century it championed the Irish immigrants, who encountered much prejudice on the part of WASP gentility.  The name "Tammany" derives from Tamanend, a chieftain of the Lenape people.  The organization adopted many Native American words and customs.  The hall itself, then on East 14th Street, was referred to as the Wigwam, its head was the Grand Sachem, and its members were the braves.  These posts are fictional in part, mostly as regards dialog, but they adhere closely to historical fact.

        *                    *                   *                    *                  *                  *                  *

Minus the shirtfront diamond.   William Marcy Tweed, president of the Board of Supervisors, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, city street commissioner, and senator of the state of New York was a mountain of a man, tough-skinned, tough-gutted, with big shoulders, big hands, big feet, a domed skull where hair grew like weeds from a rock, and a close-cropped red-brown beard over a massive shirtfront with a cherry-sized diamond in the middle like a meteor in a white sky. All the Tammany leaders sported diamonds, but his was the biggest and the blaziest.

     A master of men who once had been called “Big Bill,” but now (and he loved it) “Boss,” he had a ruddy tint of prosperity, a handshake that always gripped too tight, and a bold laugh, deep and booming, that rumbled in his guts, shook his frame, pulsed others till the whole room quaked with mirth. In a good mood, his voice was plumed and downy and stroked you to his ends. When angry, he smashed his fist in his palm, iced you with his eye.


     His office at 59 Duane Street, just north of City Hall, had a glazed glass door that announced in gold lettering  WILLIAM   M.  TWEED,  ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.  His pal Judge Barnard had admitted him to the bar; he knew no law. But the railings were nicked, and the doorknobs smoothed, by visitors who tapped his wisdom or besieged him with requests. Within a few busy minutes one morning he might patch up a quarrel between two aldermen; approve a contract for plastering the new county courthouse; and with a stroke of a pen create a deputy tax commissioner, a distributor of corporation ordinances, and an inspector of weights and measures – smokers of expensive cigars who thereafter would each be seen often amid the black walnut furnishings of Tammany Hall, but rarely on the job.
 A ball at Tammany Hall on January 9, 1860, to commemorate the 1815 battle of New Orleans.  
Too genteel and formal to be one of the Tammany balls where Tweed's double shuffle was a hit.
     To that same office came Councilman Hinkidink O’Toole, complaining that a court clerkship he wanted for his son had gone to Jim “Maneater” Cusick, a burly graduate of Sing Sing. Tweed consoled him: “C’mon, Hinkidink, shake off that blue funk. As street commissioner I can pave streets in your district.” Then, engagingly, putting an arm around the man’s slumped shoulders: “How about a new sewer?” Grudgingly, Hinkidink brightened.

Ticket for an Engine Company No. 6 soirée at Niblo's
Saloon, 1859.     Slipping a fiver and the promise of a job to an old pal from Engine Company No. 6 who had fallen on hard times, he remembered how years before, red-shirted and sprinting over cobbles, he had shouted through a silver trumpet, “Jump her, boys! Jump her!” as his company of volunteer firemen hauled Big Six toward the swirling smoke of a blaze – maybe the happiest time of his life.

     City Comptroller Slippery Dick Connolly, a jovial, clean-shaven ward boss, dropped by once to announce that Peter “Brains” Sweeny, the city chamberlain, known to his friends as Squire, was forfeiting votes because he couldn’t smile. “For one whole evenin’, Boss, I slapped him on the back till he was sore, shook his hand till his fingers and mine too ached, and made him smile and smile till every muscle in his mouth was twitchin’. ‘That’s it, Squire,’ I told him. ‘Go out among the lads like that, and you’ll be a roarin’ success.’ No use: he went out glum as ever. He’ll cost us a deal o’ votes.”

     “Well Dick,” said Tweed, “he’s not called ‘Brains’ for nothing. No glad-hander, but in his quiet way he gets things done. Twists a lot of arms in corridors.”
A. Oakey Hall, mayor of New York 1869-72.  This photo gives only a hint of his elegance.  The pince-nez were characteristic of the man.   Then “Brains” Sweeny himself, a short, solid man with a mass of unkempt jet-black hair and a bushy walrus mustache, came in complaining that District Attorney A. Oakey Hall was a popinjay. “Darts and bounces around like a pixie, wearing those droopy pinch-noses with a fluttering cord, while quoting Shakespeare and spouting bad puns. He writes plays, for God’s sake! And a dandy to boot – has fifty vests and twice as many ties!”

     “Now Peter,” said the Boss, “I know he wears velvet collars and embroidered vests, and cufflinks that he designs himself, but he’s our bridge to the bluebloods, gets invited into fancy parlors where we can’t set foot and maybe wouldn’t want to. Oakey’s all right; all he needs is ballast. He’d make a damn good mayor.”


     In the realm of power the Boss knew everyone: Commodore Vanderbilt, who conferred with him about railroad rights of way; Justice George G. Barnard, Tammany’s brandy-sipping beau ideal of the bench; mayors and ex-mayors; governors and ex-governors; and toward election time assorted gang leaders and thugs, including Pegleg Gordon, who in scuffles at polls unscrewed his leg and swung. Consulting, smiling, joking with them, he retained every name, every face. To all he pledged, “My word is my bond,” and meant it. Greeted by him, not one of them forgot his clear blue eye, his gentle, crushing hand.


A carpetbag of the 1860s.  Associated with Northern adventurers in the post-Civil War South, but common throughout the North as well.                                                                                      Sobebunny

     Seeing how power nested in Albany, the Boss got himself elected state senator. At the start of each legislative session he traveled there on the Hudson River Railroad's special 10:30 a.m. express in a palace railroad car, leaving his private compartment at intervals to greet Sweeny and Connolly and the boys, who were playing poker in a series of smoke-filled parlor cars, their carpetbags stacked nearby. Twice each trip he walked the full length of the train, knowing that a first-name greeting and a handshake could bring joy to a Tammany man’s heart.

     In Albany he held forth in a seven-room suite in the Delavan House, keeping two inner rooms for himself, guarded by sturdy doorkeepers, and the other five accessible to callers, who marveled at potted palms, at porcelain cuspidors festooned with painted roses, and sideboards offering decanters of whiskey, brandy, and gin. There he might keep a powerful Republican senator waiting in an outer room two or three days, while attending to the needs of “Oofty Gooft” Phillips, a water register clerk turned journalist, or other lowly Tammany suppliants. Yet small-time Republicans from upstate rural districts, desperate for a bridge repair or the dredging of a waterway on which their reelection depended, were welcomed with a smile: “Don’t worry, Nat, your project’ll go through.” Meanwhile, in quiet moments in an inner room, he and Sweeny scanned every bill up before the legislature, lest they include some hidden grant of property or power for which the price had not been paid. Observers might well wonder where true power lay – in the governor’s office at the capitol, or among the cuspidors and cut-glass decanters of a certain suite in the Delavan House.

     Rarely seen with his hearth-clinging wife, whom he had lodged in a palatial Fifth Avenue brownstone, the Boss dined out often with cronies. When he hobnobbed at the upper end of the social scale, his speech was trimmed and neat; toward the lower end, it grew weedy with ain’ts. Joining in every toast at Tammany banquets, he barely sipped his wine, let others get drunk. At Tammany balls he led the boys, all of them spruced up in blue coats with brass buttons, in a grand march around the hall with their ladies while the band played “Hail to the Chief,” then frisked with a series of partners in a polka or mazurka, his huge frame surprisingly agile, his double shuffle the hit of the night. He was ravenous at clambakes, where juices dripped from his beard, but just as often, donning a pleated shirt with pearl buttons, he dined with the Elegant Oakey at Delmonico’s, where after a creamy potage and lobster in mayonnaise, he savored the crackle of woodcock as he crunched through delicate bones.

     The son of a chairmaker of the Seventh Ward on the Lower East Side, he had come far, at last had money to burn. With a heart as big as a courthouse he gave to Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and to hospitals, orphanages, the poor in winter, and one-legged veterans of Gettysburg hawking shoelaces from wooden trays on the street. “Give,” he told his cronies, “always give.”

      When reformers stiff in starched collars suggested that he had given too much to too many, that his marble company, printing company, and stationery company had milked the city of millions, he bristled. At the William M. Tweed Club of the Seventh Ward, where weary manure inspectors and assistant health wardens could relax at billiards and brandy, he told the assembled members: “Them croakers got scrubbed fingernails and shiny boots, they holds their nose and preaches. They ain’t never gonna know this city. It sprawls, it stinks. The streets is horseshit. But there’s more life in one sweaty block of tenements in this old Seventh Ward than in all their brownstones together. I love this city – it’s my steak, gristle and all!”

     The club members mounted three rousing cheers for the Boss that rattled the grand piano and bounced off the bronze chandeliers. The next night, in a white waistcoat, he might dine with Judge Barnard amid the damasked elegance of Delmonico’s on truffled quail.

A Matthew Brady photograph of a painting of Tammany Hall members, early 1860s. 
 The second seated figure to the right of the table looks very much like Tweed.              In the 1868 elections he put District Attorney Hall up for mayor, Mayor Hoffman up for governor, and backed a score of other candidates as well; to elect them, Tammany mounted rallies and torchlight parades. As election day approached, Judge Barnard, white topper cocked at an angle while he sipped from a flask of brandy, naturalized up to nine hundred citizens a day by scrawling his initials on piles of blank applications. If witnesses to vouch for the applicants were lacking, he sent a bailiff to haul strangers in from the corridors and street. Thus certified, throng after throng of applicants took the oath intoned by the clerk, crowding round the only Bible in the courtroom, so packed together that each could barely graze it with a fingertip. “Vote early and often,” one veteran repeater urged them. “First yer votes with a mustache an’ whiskers, then quick to the barber an’ off with the chin fringe. Vote agin, then off with the sideburns. Vote agin, then off with the mustache, so yer votes plain-faced at last.  That’s four votes sure an’ simple.”

     On election night, long before the results were final, men and boys were piling up tar barrels, fences, cellar doors, and even wooden Indians that cigar store owners had failed to secure, to make bonfires in the street. The Boss and his cronies watched with smiles as in street after street of the Seventh Ward the dancing flames licked skyward, while boys danced and howled, and men discharged pistols and rifles in the air. To no one’s surprise, all his men got in. Throughout the city a deep gloom settled over reformers in brownstones, while joy crackled in tenements and shanties. City and state were his; not even he knew how far his ambition might reach. There were even rumors that he hankered, at least in fantasy, to be named ambassador to the Court of Saint James, where he would bow graciously, though with republican simplicity, to Victoria Regina, Queen of England and soon-to-be Empress of India.

     William Marcy Tweed, a humble son of the city, was a man for whom the world had opened like a split rind; he tasted of its juices.


    City of Wonder:  What is it about New York?  In the last several days I have encountered two memorable encomiums of the city of New York.  In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times (7/28/13) Jan Morris, a Welsh author and traveler who has been coming here annually since 1953, comments on how the city has and has not changed.  When she first came here, it was the City That Never Sleeps, the Never-Finished City, the Wonder City.  Its architecture was the most exciting, its culture the most vibrant, its banks the richest, its slang an influence on how people talked across half the world.  On her first evening in New York, a waiter said to her, "Just ask, ask for anything you like.  Listen, in this city there's nothing you can't have."  Today, by way of contrast, the city is more modest, gentler, older, wiser, subtler.  And yet, it is still the Never-Finished City, a concentration of buildings that she sees as a concentration of character.  And she proclaims it the most decent of the great cities of today, its truest icon the Statue of Liberty, expressing the truest purpose of the city and the nation.  All this, from a foreigner who lives, not in some foreign metropolis, but in Wales!  To her, we should be deeply grateful.

     The other praise came from a Facebook friend living in London, but who longs for her native New York.  Since she has published photos showing her disporting blithely in the vales of Albion, I told her  she was obviously having fun over there, proof that New York wasn't the center of the world.  Her answer: "Baloney!  How can any place replace the beauty of the thriving, exciting, exhilarating, creative, energetic, and diverse mind-blowing city like NY?  Don't ya know once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker???"  And in a second message she added, "Can't you see the grimace through my smile?  What kind of New Yorker are you who can't see the pain of being away from one's soul home?"  At which point I acknowledged she was a true New Yorker and there was peace between us.

     I only hope this city can live up to the image its friends abroad have of it.  Yes, it's special, very special.  That's what this blog is all about.

     Wienie update #2:  Mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner, he of the ongoing sexting scandal, is now besieged with demands that he abandon the race, but he persists.  In the latest poll he has dropped from first to fourth place, with Mistress Quinn now again in the lead.  (See Wienie Update in the previous post: #74, July 28, 2013).  Meanwhile an unlikely alliance of business interests, women's groups, and labor unions have united in an effort to stop ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer, our other scandal-tainted candidate, in his bid to become city comptroller.  The farce continues.  (See Election Note in post #72, July 13, 2013.)

     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, How America Goes to War: 1861, New York (how we did it then and how we do it now).  Wednesday, August 7: Thomas Nast and the Power of the Pen (how a clever cartoonist brought down the most powerful man in the city).  In the offing: the Hercules of Parks, and Battling Bella and the Queen of Mean.


©  2013  Clifford Browder





©  2013  Clifford Browder

74. Go Ahead: The Mania and Disease of Progress

     New Yorkers walk fast.  When our friend Barbara from Maine came here, knowing Boston and Washington already, her first remark was, "The pace of New York!"  Yes, we don't stroll, we scurry.  God help the visitor who gets between a New Yorker and his train or bus; the result will be mayhem -- not intended, not sadistic -- but mayhem nonetheless.  Other big cities are no different, as for instance Paris and Rome.  But in this country no one surpasses New York in fast walking.  And it was always so.  By 1830 visitors were observing the a New York merchant walked as if he had a good dinner ahead of him and a pack of creditors behind him.

     Why this hurry?  Many reasons, no doubt.  Above all, New Yorkers are doers and they want to get on with it.  This too goes way back.  Nineteenth-century New Yorkers -- like nineteenth-century Americans generally -- were infatuated with Progress, with the idea of marching ever onward toward More, toward Bigger, Better, and Faster.  They called it Go Ahead, and it was in their blood and bone.  The founding of the United States was seen as the launching of a new form of government better than  anything the Old World could offer; wonders were anticipated.  And our early history coincided with the appearance of steamboats and locomotives, the telegraph, and machines to do just about anything.  No wonder New Yorkers worshiped Go Ahead and applied it to every aspect of their lives.

     Go Ahead was the poor grocery clerk who started out buying a keg of beeswax and ended up with a fortune.  It was the fabricator of dyspepsia pills spreading out into real estate, and the dapper doctor who (sequentially) married three ladies of property.

     Go Ahead was clipper ships fighting their way around Cape Horn to California or Canton, their black hulls topped by clouds of sail, beating into blizzards, keening winds, and flying gray shrouds of water.  Or agents of commission merchants sent out to hot distant places and often dying of yellow fever, their bodies shipped home in hogsheads of wine.  No matter; Go Ahead meant that clippers and agents would keep on going out.

     Go Ahead was flint-willed Cornelius Vanderbilt grumbling about weak-kneed subordinates and going all the way to Nicaragua to bounce, scrape, haul a steamboat up a rock-filled jungle river and open a new route to the Pacific.  And Dan Drew and Isaac Newton, graduates of the cattle yard and freight barge, constructing for their People’s Line floating palaces the like of which the world had never seen: gas-lit saloons curtained in French satin damask and topped by a stained-glass dome, Corinthian columns flanked by Gothic arches, and over the bed in the bridal room a painted altarpiece with Cupid holding two doves – vast, swift palaces for Everyman that were hailed the length of the Hudson by cheering crowds, tolling bells, and a lusty little cannon in Albany.  So what if this was a mishmash of styles?  It was a stunning mishmash such as New Yorkers had never before seen, and nothing was too good for Everyman; there were palace hotels already, and soon there would be palace railway cars as well: democracy in action.


The stateroom saloon of the Isaac Newton,
a palace steamboat.

A Pullman palace car.  Upholstered seats, ample lighting,
ornate decoration.















































     Go Ahead had nothing to do with pretty sunsets, quiet reflection, tact.  It was thundering omnibuses, rattling wagons, the smite of horseshoes on paving stones, drivers’ oaths, jams, locked wheels in the eye-stinging, teeth-gritting dust or juicy black mire of Broadway.  It was flux: Wall Street banks reaching out for old brick residences that became offices, as women and greenery vanished and new buildings blocked out the sun, while in the cellars of old ones, instead of sacks of potatoes and fine wines, pudgy brokers sat beside skinny ones, getting rich.

Broadway, 1860.

















Broadway today.  Cars instead of carriages, 
but otherwise is there any real change?
Alex Proimos

         


















 
     Go Ahead was the dry goods trade bursting its seams on Pearl Street, spilling out to the north and the west, tearing down seedy boardinghouses and elegant homes to put up white marble warehouses crammed with flannels and muslins, succeeding where moralists had failed by driving the whores out of Church Street.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811
(a provisional 1807 version).  The
darkened lower part indicates
the city at that time.  Central
Park was not anticipated.

     Rectilinear, it didn't like curves.  As it pushed the city's frontier northward (the only direction it could go in on this cigar-shaped island), it chopped down orchards, obliterated ponds, filled in valleys, and lopped off hills.  Why?  Because in 1811 the City Fathers in their infinite wisdom had decreed for all the island of Manhattan a gridiron of flat, rigid rectangles, fixing forever the pattern of the city's streets.

     And it was messy.  Digging up old cemeteries for development, it shoveled out onto pavements shreds of graveclothes, bones, and as one shocked bystander reported, bits of half-fleshed skull with tufts of bright blond hair.  At building sites it coughed up clouds of plaster, sent avalanches of timbers, brickbats, and slate down upon walkways hopefully now denied to pedestrians, and when blasting rock outcroppings, dropped a four-hundred-pound boulder through the roof and three floors of a mansion to lodge between two ceiling beams in a gentleman’s parlor.  (No, I'm not making this up.) 



















     Did New Yorkers complain of all this flux and to-do?  No, they applauded it.  They applauded the spirit of Young America, and wasted no tears on the loss of a few trees -- two hundred, more or less -- when St. John's Park was cleared to make room for the Hudson River Railroad's freight depot.  And if the last of the old Dutch buildings got demolished, they shed no tears for them either, or for anything that could be labeled Old Fogey.  This was a new land with new ideas, new streets and buildings, new inventions, new territories, new customs, new religions.  Yes, Go Ahead even spilled over into sermons delivered in the city's most fashionable churches, where there were fewer and fewer exhortations of "Repent, ye sinners," and more and more evocations of humanity's endless rise to beautiful proportions.  Coming to want religion without God or sin, Americans embraced a brisk, forward-looking brand of faith that seemed less Old Fogey, more vibrant and cheery, more attuned to Young America and all it was up to.  After all, they were told, New York was a locomotive pulling the rest of the nation into the dazzling world of tomorrow.

     Nineteenth-century New York did have three stellar accomplishments, still with us, that embody the age of Go Ahead: the initiation of a modern water supply system in 1842, the opening of Central Park (though still unfinished) in 1859, and that of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, all of them financed by the city without outside aid (though Brooklyn helped with the bridge).  Thanks to the first two, respectable citizens could romp in shower stalls and baths sleek as eels, and disport in an urban Arcadia free of fast drivers, hucksters, and hurdy-gurdy men.


Entrance to the Park at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, 1863.
Cornell University Library     And thanks to the marvel of the Bridge, Brooklynites could surge over its arched span to markets, shops, and jobs in Manhattan, and New Yorkers could make excursions by foot or carriage not to Brooklyn (what was Brooklyn to them?) but into space, calm, and light.  And if, soon after its opening, crowds pouring over the Bridge from either end met in the middle in a tight jam, and people screamed and were trampled, and twelve people died, no matter: there was nothing like it; they called it the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Building the Bridge, 1883.

The Eighth Wonder of the World.
Postdlf
Our present and our future?
Americasroof     Today we still embrace Go Ahead, want More, Bigger, Better, and Faster.  Yes, the new World Trade Center won't be quite so high, and we'll let other nations like Malaysia, China, and Dubai vie for building the tallest structure in the world.  But our whole economy is based on growth.  We want to produce more, sell more, earn more, consume more, even if the world's resources are shrinking.  Here in Manhattan, even as foreclosures and homelessness soar in the outer boroughs, luxury towers are being planned and built in record numbers.  An 84-story high-rise at 432 Park Avenue near 56th Street is going up, but already, with only ten floors completed, buyers are snapping up apartments for astronomical prices in what will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere; the top penthouse, with six bedrooms and seven baths and a library, not to mention ten-foot-square windows offering breathtaking views, is under contract for $95 million.  And who are the buyers?  Their identity is confidential, but half are reportedly foreigners:  Russian and Latin American tycoons, Arab sheiks, Asian billionaires.  So Go Ahead today isn't just the obsession of New York and this nation, it has been embraced by the world, or more accurately, by the world's superrich and all who cater to their needs and caprices.  Go Ahead is global.

     Furthermore Mayor Bloomberg, fearful lest New York fall behind Shanghai and Chicago in development, is advocating a rezoning proposal to replace aging commercial buildings with giant new office towers in East Midtown, a 73-block area around Grand Central Station up to 57th Street between Madison and Third Avenues.  Critics point out that the proposed new towers would overwhelm beloved monuments like Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building, and do nothing to make the city more livable; what is needed to make the city more competitive, they insist, is not more tall glass towers but improved mass transit, pedestrian-friendly streets and parks, and vibrant neighborhoods.

     But is Go Ahead feasible today?  Two hundred years ago we had a whole continent to explore, claim, settle, and exploit, but today our continent and all continents are environmentally threatened.  We can continue on our merry way or we can change, but the change would have to be comprehensive and profound.  Will we do it?  So far, I hear a lot of talk but see very little meaningful action; people resist change, when it impinges on their habits and comfort.  Our President has embraced nuclear power and fracking, dreams of reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.  A delicious dream, but at what cost?  Will we summon up the political will to try alternatives?  I'm not an optimist but would love to be proven wrong.  Time will tell.


     Gas in the subway: The S.O.B.'s are at it again.  Speaking of progress, or the lack of it, consider this notice from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to its subway riders:
Thank you for riding the MTA.At this time we would like to thank you for participating in a joint study conducted by the NYPD [New York Police Department] and Brookhaven National Laboratory, sponsored by the Department of Defense.During the month of July riders will be randomly exposed to Per-fluorocarbon gas in five boroughs and on 21 subway lines in an effort to study airflow throughout the MTA subway system.Per-fluorocarbons are colorless, odorless, and powerful man-made greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. They are emitted as a by-product during aluminum production, are used as solvents in the electronics industry, and as refrigerants in many cooling systems.We still do not fully understand the health effects of Per-fluorocarbon gas exposure, though exposure to Per-fluorocarbons are linked to the early onset of menopause. Studies in animals have found these gases significantly alter liver and thyroid function, increase the risk for tumors, and cause failure in reproductive organs.These gases are being dispersed as a test for your protection against an unwanted chemical attack.Thank you for riding with the MTA and have a safe day.
     So for their own protection subway riders were exposed on July 9 to a gas that may cause an early onset of menopause, and that has had deleterious effects on animals in lab tests, and they will be (or already have been) exposed to it two more times in July.  Once again, the public is being used as guinea pigs by our government.  I am aware of this thanks to (who else?) WBAI, though it was first announced last April, and numerous blogs and websites are also covering it.  I'll say no more for the moment, except to remind viewers that this is not the first time we've been used as guinea pigs by our government and the military without voluntary and informed consent.  See post #60, Is America Becoming a Fascist State? (May 12, 2013).  If this isn't itself an "unwanted chemical attack," I'd like to know what is.  But have a safe day.

     Wienie update:  Mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner (so aptly named!) has now admitted that he sent sexually explicit e-mails to at least three women after he resigned his seat in the House, thus repeating the very transgressions that provoked his resignation.  Standing loyally beside him at the press conference was his wife, that necessary appendage to all confessions by repentant sinners.  He obviously has a high opinion of his private parts, since he shares photos of them so eagerly with women he knows only online.  And now he wants voters to give him a third chance, which for me is one too many.  I cannot vote for a candidate who so consistently exhibits adolescent behavior and lack of judgment.

     A humorous aside:  I once knew a woman who worked for a man named Weiner (no relation to Anthony).  One day he received a serious business letter mistakenly addressed to "Mr. Frankfurter."  She thought it hilarious; her boss did not.

     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, Boss Tweed: How About a New Sewer? (the first of the big city bosses, and how he made this city work).  Next Sunday, How America Goes to War: 1861, New York (feverish and compulsive patriotism, plus thoughts about how we do it now).




©  2013  Clifford Browder







   

73. Secrets of New York (Browder version).

     Like any old city of a certain size, New York has its secrets: hidden or neglected places, often in plain sight but a bit off the common path and ignored by or unknown to many.  The Emmy-winning TV documentary series Secrets of New York, with a host in a black vinyl overcoat and spiked stilettos, has revealed and explained many of these secrets of the present or past, as do various websites as well.  Having no TV, I have never seen the TV series, though I applaud it.  I myself have neither a black vinyl overcoat nor spiked stilettos, but even so I will present my own New York secrets, thus rendering them -- for better or worse -- just a bit less secret, less mysterious.  So here goes.

The little house at 121 Charles Street

     At the northeast corner of Charles and Greenwich streets, only a few blocks from my apartment building, there is a little two-story wooden house, white with blue trim, that seems strangely planted there, dwarfed by the six-floor apartment building next to it that it stands smack against.  That such a free-standing house exists at all in the West Village, a high-rent district crowded with old or not-so-old row houses, is amazing.  The house and its small adjoining yard are surrounded by a high wall covered with thick vines, but one can get a glimpse of the house and yard through the grilled iron gate of the  driveway.  Whenever I pass the house I stop for a quick glimpse, noting in the yard a bird bath, what looks like a sundial but may be something else, and a small gazebo with a bench.  The house is definitely lived in, but I have never seen anyone on the property, though at times a car sits on the short cobblestone driveway just inside the gate.  I have always wondered who lived there, and why they would prefer to inhabit this small house and pay a hefty real estate tax, rather than put up an apartment building that over the years would bring in a handsome income.  Now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I have learned a lot about the mysterious little house.

                                                                                                Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
     The house was originally a farmhouse situated on a rear lot at East 71st Street and York Avenue, some 200 years old but the exact date of its construction unknown.  In 1967 the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the owner of the lot, wanted to demolish it and build a home there for the aged, but the house's owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Sven Bernhard, arranged instead to move the entire house five miles down to a vacant lot that they had purchased in the West Village, its present location.  They planted Concord grapes, a sour cherry tree, a dogwood, a magnolia, two fig trees, and an expanse of lawn.  The current owners bought it in 1988.  They are used to weekend crowds peering in through the gate, but other visitors are less welcome: a young runaway who slept there once, and a woman who asked if she could use the lawn as a dog run.  The visitors make all kinds of comments about the house, say the owners, but none of them are true.  Still a mystery house, in spite of all that can be found on the Internet.

The Christmas wreath house on Grove Street

      Another mystery house in the West Village is a three-story frame house with red shutters at 17 Grove Street, on the corner of Grove and Bedford.   Since the construction of new frame houses, seen as a fire hazard, was banned in the city in 1866, they are rare in the Village, but this one, handsome and well kept up, has survived in near-pristine condition.  At Christmastime all fourteen of its windows facing the street are adorned with wreaths with red sashes, and a peek through the ground floor windows reveals one or more Tiffany lamps, suggesting a sumptuous interior.  Over the years Bob and I have often gone out of our way to see this house with the wreaths, and we have always wondered how old it was and who lived there.  Again, the Internet has given us some answers.

                                                                                                 Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
     The house was built in 1822 with only two stories, but a third was added in 1870, and at the same time, no doubt, its Italianate-style cornice, so typical of Greek Revival and brownstone houses.  It was built for William Hyde, a window sash maker whose shop was located just across a yard in a separate two-story structure at 100 Bedford Street, another old building that I had always been curious about.  Given the city's rapid expansion, Mr. Hyde's business probably did well, since new buildings required double-hung windows with sash weights.  Over time, the building went through many ups and downs; a 1936 photograph shows an unsightly fire escape, and bedding hanging out the top windows to air -- a somewhat shabby appearance.  The little shop building nearby once housed a tea room, but since then, like the house itself, it has been restored as a private residence.  Mr. Hyde would probably be amazed to learn that today his little shop building -- not the house but the shop -- has been appraised at over two million dollars, and that its annual tax bill is $14,503.32.


The old Jewish cemetery on West 11th Street


                                                               Beyond My Ken    A site that few people are aware of is an old Jewish cemetery on West 11th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue.  Today it is only a sliver of land with some twenty headstones, wedged in among much taller residential buildings, walled off from the sidewalk but visible from the gate.  Originally it was part of a larger cemetery established in 1805, but threatened by the city's extension of West 11th Street in 1826.  The Jewish residents petitioned the city to spare the land not needed for the street extension, and so this corner of the cemetery was preserved and is still cared for to this day.






The Meadow in Pelham Bay Park

     In summer Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx is crowded with sunbathers and swimmers at Orchard Beach, and picnickers at the picnic tables in the open grassy area just back of the south end of the beach.  But these crowds seem completely oblivious of another attraction there, the Meadow, an open space with bayberry shrubs and grasses indicated in all the maps and park guidebooks, but not easily accessed, since paths leading into it from the picnic area are often overgrown and hard to find.  After many misses I finally found access by noting a path entrance near three trees, two of them sycamores, with a bus station visible through some trees in one direction and a big beach facility visible in another.  Going in by this path I would leave the noise of picnickers and distant beachgoers behind and find myself alone in the Meadow, except for an occasional nude male sunbather stretched out on some flat rock.  In the Meadow I would also find wildflowers: cinquefoils and common St. Johnswort, purple loosestrife, narrow-leaved mountain mint, a towering sunflower, and early goldenrod, but also the red fruit of the sumac and, with luck, the first blackberries.  But what I savored most, sitting on my favorite smooth outcropping of rock, was the silence, the vast, deep silence, while puffy white clouds drifted across a clean blue sky.  It was the only spot in that huge, busy park where I could find such calm.

Staten Island:  The Groin of Summer


New York ironweed.
SB Johnny    I have often hiked in the Staten Island Greenbelt, a broad expanse of green in the very center of Staten Island.  Leaving Forest Hill Road on the Yellow Trail, I would take the Red Trail down to a low, wet area that I call the Groin of Summer because, on a hot, muggy day, it seems the very essence of summer, rich, fertile, and secret, a spot that I alone seem to know.  I have never encountered another hiker there, and if I did, I'm sure that hiker would simply tramp on through.  In the Groin's moist soil I have seen thirsty flowers like boneset and Pennsylvania smartweed, and a thick, rich stand of New York ironweed towering to seven feet, its bold purple flowers visited by bumblebees and spotted skippers, cabbage butterflies, and spicebush and tiger swallowtails.  The soil is moist, but there is no standing water and therefore no mosquitoes.  I have always lingered there in the muggy depth of summer, reluctant to leave this magical spot that I might not visit again for a year.  (Yes, here I am penetrating Big Mama yet again and being enveloped by her; see post #59 on earth goddesses.)

Staten Island:  Heyerdahl Hill

     Going on from the Groin on the Red Trail, I would ascend Heyerdahl Hill, whose 241-foot elevation makes it one of the highest points on the eastern seaboard.  There I would encounter entirely different species of wildflowers, ones that prefer a high, dry habitat.  Veering off the trail on an unmarked path downhill, halfway down I would come to a spot known as Buck's Hollow and find the ruins of the Heyerdahl farmhouse, said to have been built about 1860 and burned circa 1910, though some date the construction of the house much earlier.  The Heyerdahl family once had a large farm here with orchards and an extensive vineyard, but Staten Island's rocky soil defeated them and they had to give it up.  Now all is overgrown, with crumbling foundations and some steps where I would sit for a few minutes in the shade.  In the distance, faintly, I might hear a barking dog, a hint of traffic.  Another quiet spot that I usually had to myself.

Staten Island:  Moses' Folly

     Hiking another trail, the Blue Trail, I would go past the three lakes of Clove Lakes Park, the most civilized segment of the trail, traverse a bit of suburbia, and then turn right off Little Clove Road to leave suburbia abruptly behind and follow a dirt path through a tangle of vegetation that by midsummer could be almost impassable.  Following the trail's blue blazes, I would hike up a fifty-foot embankment and come out on an abandoned highway ramp high above the noisy six-lane Staten Island Expressway.

Here the Blue Trail leaves Little Clove Road.
Bridge and Tunnel Club

The Blue Trail negotiates Moses' Folly.
Bridge and Tunnel Club
The trail's blazes lead across the glass-strewn, graffiti-ridden ramp, where sumac and mugwort poke up through the cracks, and alfalfa and butter-and-eggs and round-headed bush clover grow in an adjacent field.  The trail then descends a steep wooded hillside past abandoned vehicles overgrown with weeds, crosses a trickle of a brook cluttered with more dead cars, and climbs steeply up again to another abandoned overpass that ends abruptly to the left but is marked with blue blazes leading to the right.

Below the Blue Trail overpass.
Bridge and Tunnel Club
Rushing throughway traffic, deserted vehicles, ramps lunging futilely skyward, mugwort and sumac and alfalfa, broken glass and graffiti all combine to form an absolutely surreal landscape where nature and technology coexist uneasily, the like of which I've never seen elsewhere in the city, or perhaps anywhere.  This is Moses' Folly, the start of a highway planned by master builder Robert Moses that would have slashed right through the Greenbelt, a grandiose project characteristic of its ruthlessly determined planner, but canceled in the 1970s after years of protest and litigation when outraged citizens staged demonstrations and found allies in high places.  Also commemorating the frustrated builder is Moses' Mountain, an artificial rise just off the Yellow Trail near High Rock Park, created from excavations for the canceled project.  I hiked up it once but wasn't overwhelmed by the vegetation or the views; maybe I was there at the wrong time of year.  (More about Robert Moses in a future post.)


Greenwich Village courtyards


Milligan Place entrance.
Beyond My Ken

     Returning to Manhattan, let's have a look at some secret spots in the Village right near where I live: little private courtyards walled off from the street and accessed by a gate that you could easily walk past, unaware of the tiny community within.  One such is Milligan Place, located off Sixth Avenue between West 10th and West 11th streets, a private courtyard with four three-story brick houses built in 1852, and in the middle of the courtyard, a tree, a birdbath, and flowers.  When walking about in the Village, I try to keep an eye out for these sites and inspect them through the gate at the entrance, though I have never entered one since I respect their privacy.  In this case, one has no choice: the gate is securely locked, creating an oasis of tranquility in the midst of urban hurly-burly.  Who lives here and how they obtain this privilege I don't know, which adds a further touch of mystery.











Milligan Place inside the gate, a view that I have never had.
Beyond My Ken

     Not far from Milligan Place in the West Village is another courtyard, Patchin Place, a short dead-end  lane off West 10th Street between Greenwich and Sixth Avenues, just across from the Jefferson Market Library.  Lining it are ten three-story brick row houses built in 1848; descendants of the Patchin family, who then owned the land, resided there until 1920.  Early in the twentieth century Patchin Place became popular with artists and writers who wanted a bit of privacy in the midst of bohemia, this being a time when the Village offered low, not high, rents.  In 1917 the addition of indoor plumbing, electricity, and steam heat made the rooms a bit less bohemian but more livable.  The poet e.e. cummings and the reclusive writer Djuna Barnes both lived there until their death, cummings at #4 from 1923 to 1962, and Barnes at #5 from 1941 to 1982.  They knew each other and cummings would check on her by shouting out his window, "Are you still alive, Djuna?"  But in 1963, when a developer wanted to tear down the houses on both Patchin and Milligan Places to put up a high-rise apartment building, Barnes emerged to lead a protest movement, saying she would die if she had to move.  She also said, less helpfully, that destruction of the neighborhood would leave local youths with nowhere to practice their mugging.  The courtyards were saved, and the creation of the Greenwich Village Historic District in 1969 guaranteed their survival.  Patchin Place lacks the secluded charm of Milligan Place but, given its history, it is a must-see for Greenwich Village tours, though it has now earned the name "therapy row" because many psychotherapists have moved in since the 1990s.  One thing that hasn't changed since the nineteenth century is the gas street lamp, one of only two in the city, though it is now powered by electricity.

Patchin Place in 2011.
Beyond My Ken
     Not all Village courtyards are so famous or desirable.  On a brief excursion recently I discovered one on the north side of West 12th Street just east of Eighth Avenue.  It too has the requisite grilled gate, opening to a flagstone walk lined with greenery and leading to two entrances well back from the street.  Narrow and dark, it lacks the charm of Milligan and Patchin Places.  And at 305 and 307 West 11th Street, between Hudson and Greenwich Streets, I found a grilled fence thickly screened in front with bushes, rendering almost invisible from the street the steps leading down to a basement apartment, and a small lawn with a towering sycamore, behind which, near the other entrance, is a patio with garden chairs and a tub of flowers.  This one too gets little light, but in the heat of summer maybe that's not so bad.  The Internet informs me that these are Greek revival townhouses built in 1836, with the original plank floors, fireplace mantles, and other details.

The mystery of basements

     In this city I have always been fascinated by sidewalk entrances to basements, those entrances revealing steep stairs descending into darkness, as if into some mysterious underworld, some land of the forbidden or the dead.  Always I have wondered,  What's down there?  What's going on in those dark regions below?  In the case of shops and restaurants, it's obvious: their supplies are stored down there.  But what about residential buildings?  Boilers, no doubt, and meters recording use of electricity and gas.  For the average tenant, those devices themselves are mysterious, but is there anything else?  I have never presumed to venture down those stairs disappearing into darkness, with one exception: my own apartment building.  Whenever we have lost power in our apartment, I have had to access the sidewalk entrance in front of what is now, and for long has been, the famous Magnolia Bakery, so as to flip the switches on our circuit breaker and restore power.  The circuit breakers are against the wall immediately to the left at the foot of the stairs, but usually the bakery has piled cartons or other obstacles in front of them, so getting to our circuit breaker has always been a challenge.  But there is much more down there than circuit breakers and meters, and I still don't know exactly what.  Sometimes, when I undertake one of these descents, a Magnolia employee emerges out of the shadows to help me remove the obstacles, but what he is down there for otherwise I cannot imagine.  Our basement is an unexplored hinterland, a realm of mystery.

     There is another entrance to our basement, in fact two, accessing another part of this hidden underworld that is separated from the realm of meters and circuit breakers.  With a key, you can enter through an outside door under the building's residential entrance, or, if you gain access to the building, you can go down a dark stairway in the ground floor back, near the area where garbage and recyclables are kept.  I have been down there only once, long ago, when our boiler broke down in midwinter and the building lacked heat.  In the boiler room I found a large contraption with all kinds of dials and numbers that supposedly regulated our heat, too complex and baffling a mechanism for me to flick a switch in hopes of restoring heat to the building.  Other tenants might have been tempted to try and in so doing might have made things worse, so I could understand why boiler rooms might be off limits to tenants.  But even with a nonfunctioning boiler, the room was marvelously warm and inhabited -- by flies!  So I learned where flies go in winter.  Not to Miami, but to the nearest boiler room.  We were shivering upstairs, but they were cozy and warm down there.  And once, quite recently, there was another resident, a homeless man whom the previous super had hired to take out the trash.  The homeless man decided to make a nest for himself down there and one night, drunk, he set the place on fire.  Fortunately, the fire was put out quickly.  The super stayed carefully away until the firemen left, but then, thinking the crisis over, returned and, to his surprise, was questioned by the police.  The homeless man was dismissed and his nest eradicated, and soon we had a new super.  Realms of mystery can also be realms of danger.

Flowered bikes

     In my neighborhood I have often seen a bike with its front basket richly adorned with artificial flowers -- so adorned that you can't help but notice it.  I see it locked to a street sign or some other immovable object, but never with its owner, who remains a mystery; he -- or she -- seems to want attention but is never there.  I thought there was only one such flowered bike in the area, but recently, going up Seventh Avenue on errands, I found another similarly parked near West 12th Street.  This was a woman's bike with its front basket festooned with fake flowers, and a plate like a license plate attached to the rear wheel that said  WILD  GIRL.  Wild Girl was nowhere in sight, so she too is a mystery.  Attached to the basket also was a small plastic cup, perhaps to hold a beverage or to receive donations, I don't know which.  I shall keep an eye out for both these flowered bikes and report any further information encountered.  But when I googled "flowered bike," to my surprise I found that this is no rare phenomenon; flowered bikes are in evidence both here and in Europe.  But in the West Village they are still rare enough to attract attention, mine included.

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
The killdeer, a strident spring visitor.
ShutterGlow.com
     Grasses bending in the breeze, tang of marsh.  Flaunting its double breast band, the killdeer shrills its name or an insistent dee-dee-dee.  Tree swallows dart and zip and perch, then dart again.  Overhead, black-headed laughing gulls shriek their laugh in a rich cacophony, while ibises with decurved beaks emit a guttural ka-onk, and osprey soar, or drop down to their nest atop a wooden platform to feed the greedy beaks of their young.  From fence posts or the tops of bushes, streaky-breasted song sparrows give forth their musical and sometimes buzzy song, while in the marsh grasses nearby, male red-winged blackbirds flaunt their red epaulets and sing a gurgled konk-la-ree.  Low over the open grasslands a white-rumped marsh hawk glides, while a score of white-feathered egrets perch in trees across the pond.  From every side, songs and calls of birds unseen or seen, trills and clicks and buzzes, bright chants and high-pitched warbles, and high in the sky the croak of a crow buzzed by a trio of redwings.  Sounds and sights, the burst and turbulence of spring.

Canada geese are seen year round at the Refuge,
where they are welcome.  Not so welcome in 
urban parks and golf courses.

A snowy egret in flight.  A beautiful bird in the 
air or on the ground.  Has a black beak and
"golden slippers."
Dori
































     Late summer: four thousand tree swallows in bushes and weeds or ahead of me on the gravel path, taking flight as I slowly approach, becoming a fine dust of birds in the air, birds over me and on every side of me, flying within eight feet of me and settling back down on the path behind me as if I had never approached them, never routed them from their chosen stretch of ground.

     Or autumn: at my approach, a thousand snow geese, white bodies with black-tipped wings, explode into the air, and then another thousand, rising and soaring, the air vibrant with their loud, piercing bark.

Snow geese in flight.  A sight you won't soon forget. 
Einar Einarsson Kvaran
     Such is the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, which I have visited in every season of the year, a favorite haunt of birdwatchers, but otherwise too remote to attract many nature lovers simply out for a  gentle walk in the wild.  The refuge's salt marshes, fields and woods, fresh-water and brackish ponds, and wide expanse of bay draw hundreds of migrating birds, and are home to snakes and muskrats, butterflies and dragonflies, fierce-looking but harmless horseshoe crabs, and diamondback terrapin, oceangoing turtles that crawl ashore in early summer to lay their eggs in the sand.  And a habitat as well for wood ticks in late spring, and mosquitoes and pesky flies in midsummer, which is why I've avoided the refuge from late June through mid-August, by which time at least the flies have subsided.  I was there on 9/11 watching the fall migration of warblers, and saw the Twin Towers enveloped in smoke that was carried for miles over Brooklyn to the ocean.  With subway service to Manhattan suspended, that night I had to be put up by a friend in Brooklyn, before finally returning to Manhattan the following morning.  In spite of that memory, and the ticks and mosquitoes and flies, I recommend the refuge to anyone with an appetite for nature; it's impressive, it's unique.  But be in touch with it before you go, since it and the subway line approaching it were damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

A slave gallery and a boat graveyard


The hidden rooms were on either side of the tower.
Beyond My Ken



     I'll end with two secret sites that I have never visited but that are too interesting to omit.  In Saint Augustine's Episcopal Church on the Lower East Side, which was consecrated in 1828, cramped staircases lead to two concealed rooms behind the balcony where African-American worshipers could participate in services without being seen.  Edgar Allen Poe sometimes worshiped there, and Boss Tweed, indicted and hiding from the authorities, hid in  one of the rooms to attend his mother's funeral.  Neglected for decades as a part of our shameful past, when freed slaves were victims even here of segregation, the rooms were finally restored and opened to the public in 2009.







   A swampy stretch of the Arthur Kill Road waterway on Staten Island is now a graveyard for dozens of rusting, rotting, and abandoned boats of all sizes, whose sunken hulls emerge strangely from the water, listing to one side or the other.  Not easily accessed by car or bike, the sight is said to be oddly majestic and beautiful.  I know it only from photos, but it does seem to have a haunting cemetery-like atmosphere.  Another forgotten corner of the city, and a perfect one to conclude with.

Kaitlyn Tikkun


     Scam alert:  A few days ago I got an e-mail from my publisher informing me that he was on an impromptu tour in the Philippines, unannounced to anyone in advance, and was in a desperate situation.  He had lost his wallet, and his hotel was holding his passport until he settled his bill.  Please, could I send him $2500, which he would repay as soon as he returned.  This sounded phony, so I answered saying that I needed more confirmation.  Another e-mail soon came asking if I recognized the enclosed e-mail I had sent him recently.  This was the e-mail I send to friends on Sunday morning, announcing a new post in my blog.  Since anyone could access that e-mail, I was now more suspicious than ever.  So I answered by asking how we knew each other, what is our connection?  This time I got no answer.  Leery of e-mails, I phoned the publisher and learned that he was not, of course, in the Philippines and was fully aware of the attempted scam.  Someone had hacked into an account of his, but the compromised account had been closed and he had changed his password.  This is a familiar scam, often attempted by hackers pretending to be a beloved grandchild in desperate need of money from a doting grandparent.  Many of my viewers are probably familiar with the scam, but be on the alert anyway, since some hackers (unlike this one) are very informed and very clever, and can target a potential victim with the most persuasive appeal.  And of course never give any personal information to a stranger on the phone or online, and never hit a link to decline an e-mail offer, since that in itself may get you involved; instead, just delete the e-mail.  Ah, the wonders of the Internet!

     Coming soon:  Next week, Go Ahead: The Mania and Disease of Progress.  In the works: The Hercules of Parks (about the greatest builder since the pharaohs); and How America Goes to War: 1861, New York, with rallies, flags, threats (fly the flag, or else), the rush to uniforms, heroes real or   manufactured, and hanged effigies of traitors.  Plus asides about the Kaiser, Tojo, saving the Evanston waterworks, and Evanston's greatest wartime dissident, my father.


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

72. Liars, Cheats, and Manipulators

     We have all lied, cheated, and manipulated at least a little bit, but this post is about people who do these things habitually, weaving them into the fabric of their being.  And these offenses are linked; if one lies, one probably cheats and manipulates, and if one manipulates, one probably cheats and lies.  These are stories about real people I have known in New York, but the names are fictional.

     I met him in Nantucket.  Tall, slender, blond, with a sexy sun tan, Ralph was supple as an otter, smooth and congenial, with an engaging smile and a glib tongue, a charmer from Delaware well known to everyone on the beach and in the bars.  We connected at once, slept together at his place, cycled, took walks on the beach at night under a vast sky bright with stars.  Of course I hoped for a future of  enhanced togetherness, but noticed that maybe he knew too many people, especially young males, and greeted them all knowingly with the same warm smile he bestowed on me.  He would promise to meet me at a bar prior to dinner, but forty minutes or an hour would pass, before his bright blond charm materialized, with some vague excuse for his tardiness.  At the end of my vacation we parted, agreeing that he would visit me in New York.

     He came, took me to parties given by his friends, reveled into the distant reaches of the night till I was drooping, while assuring me that it was "only the shank of the evening."  When a friend dropped in at my place, Ralph would parade before him in his briefs, poised and nonchalant, and if we visited a friend of mine at his place, Ralph would manage to leave some small item behind, so as to have a pretext to drop by again.  By now I was downright suspicious.  Then, twice, he left me to vanish into the gloaming and its rich potential, returning the following afternoon, ever buoyant, with smiles and yet another flimsy explanation.

     By now I had had enough.

     "You're using my place as a base of operations.  Whatever you're looking for, it isn't here.  Get out!"

     Never before had I issued such an ultimatum to anyone, nor have I ever since.

     He was stunned, shocked, angry, and above all indignant at my rankest incivility.  "You're from the Midwest.  You don't know better!"

     "Get out!"

     He pleaded the most ardent pleas, argued the most passionate arguments, threatened vague dark reprisals, then sank down on the sofa in a sudden fit of vapors, languished there like a wilted lily, and when I remained unmoved, sprang up bold as beans to utter more vague dire threats, pout, plead, and argue yet again, professing to be hurt to the crux of his being.  Finally, having dented my resolve not a bit, he phoned another friend to arrange accommodations and, with a last hurt glance, departed.

     In the wake of this bravura performance I brooded for all of twenty minutes and felt a slight bit of hurt myself, then a buoyant mood of relief.  What most amazed me was not his whoredom or lies, but his dazzling repertory, revealed in that last half hour, of moods, shifts, ploys, one stratagem fading quickly into another and then another, a slick and scintillating display of virtuosity worthy of the lords of guile.



     My friend Kevin was a quintessential New Yorker, dapper, sophisticated, witty, a fervent balletomane who of necessity taught college.  He more than anyone immersed me in the New York way of life, instructed me in what clothes were acceptable, what shows I should see, and the magic of ballet.  A natty dresser, in the 1950s he favored the restrained elegance of Brooks Brothers, whose Boys Department satisfied his needs at a price well within his budget.  A decade later, when the Peacock Revolution hit, he gravitated quickly toward bell bottoms and bright-colored shirts, while his right hand glittered with a ring on every finger.  What his students thought of all this I can't imagine, but it was the age of anything-goes, so if some were put off, others must have been dazzled.

     But beneath the chic and glitter, the dark forces of his psyche picked at the structure of his ego, the edifice of his charm.  He had moments of intense insecurity, fits of depression, attacks of migraine that seemed to have no cure.  Managing money escaped him; he had a great propensity for debt.  I often told him he was the only one I knew who had made a mother of the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank, whose money (for interest) flowed to him like milk.  He was gay, but the Gay Lib movement all but passed him by, since his matings were rare and brief; maybe he asked too much.  

     One day he informed me that, during a rare foray into a bar, he had connected with a South American named Vergilio who gave off an aura of glamour -- a word that he brandished freely, and that I associated not with Latin charm, but with the publicity machine of Hollywood.  I soon met Vergilio at Kevin's, found him well-groomed, poised, and charming, with a soft voice that caressed, but enigmatic: a smile over a cocktail glass, little more.  In no time, thanks to Kevin, Vergilio was temporarily installed in the apartment of a friend of Kevin's who was going away on vacation, which I thought a bit premature, given how little Kevin knew of his newfound friend.  But Kevin was radiant, basking in the aura of glamour.

     In the weeks that followed, Kevin began evincing alarm: Vergilio's health was not all it should be.  Then he informed me that Vergilio was going to consult a doctor on the doctor's yacht, which struck me as an odd site for a consultation.  Next I got a phone call from Kevin, with anguish in his voice: "Vergilio is dying!"  His friend had informed him that he was suffering from a long-term fatal ailment, its exact nature undisclosed, that required treatment in Europe; he would be leaving soon.  So Vergilio left; Kevin moped about, waited for news, worried.  Postcards came from Paris, Monte Carlo, Nice, with only the briefest message and no news about his treatment.

     Three weeks later he was back, well-groomed and urbane as ever, the same soft voice, the same smile over a cocktail glass.  He showed Kevin and me a series of photographs from his trip, every one featuring a smiling and handsome Vergilio in a well-appointed residence, his host unidentified.  By now even Kevin sensed something amiss, but his need of glamour locked him under the spell.

     Vergilio now informed Kevin that he had to return to Europe for an operation that might or might not save his life, probably not; professing embarrassment, he confessed he needed money for the trip.  Why he had to turn to a new friend, and not to old friends and family, went unexplained.  Kevin at once gave forth of his own meager savings, then phoned any number of friends, entreating them to loan him what they could.  Some did, some didn't.  I myself, unable and unwilling to label Vergilio a liar or a fraud without convincing evidence, promised five hundred dollars but then, common sense prevailing, gently but firmly declined.  "I don't believe in it," I explained.  "I feel like I've been kicked in the teeth," said Kevin.

     Vergilio departed once again for Europe, and I heard no more of him, for Kevin and I were now estranged.  Finally I phoned a mutual friend, asking how he was.  "He's learning what he has to learn," she said, but refrained from saying more.  Months passed; other matters claimed me, but I thought often of Kevin.  Finally he phoned and invited me over.  He looked worn and wan, but got to it right away:  "If I ever see him again, I'll say to him, 'What?  You're not dead?  But that's why I gave you all that money and sent you back to Europe.  Dead -- you should be dead!'"  A hard look came over him that I had never seen before.

     To my knowledge, Vergilio never reappeared in New York; if he did, it was at a far remove from Kevin.  Kevin never mentioned his name again.  His finances habitually precarious, I doubt if he ever repaid any of his friends.  But of one thing I am sure: Vergilio is off somewhere, on this continent or another, smiling over a cocktail glass and enlisting the sympathy and generosity of friends.  New friends; to the old ones he wouldn't dare show his face.



     Warren Laforgue was a dark-haired young man with a sly and sometimes mischievous smile whom I knew at Columbia University, when he was an undergraduate in French in General Studies and I was a graduate student in French.  That year the top floor of John Jay Hall was, quite by chance, two-thirds gay, so it didn't take us long to get acquainted.  He asked if he could sleep with me, explaining that he had broken up with a longtime lover recently and had trouble sleeping alone.  Since Warren could qualify as "cute," I had no objection, but it turned out that when he said "sleep," he meant exactly that; there was a bit of togetherness, but no sex whatsoever.  I adjusted and we became friends.  There must be something in me that encourages the confidences of others, since I have been the confidant of any number of friends and family; maybe I should have been a therapist.  Warren was soon telling me all about his past and present life, minus a few gritty details of his current sexual adventures.

     Warren was a member of not one but two undergrounds at Columbia: the gay underground that I quickly discovered, and the Catholic underground headquartered in the Newman Club, whose weekly meetings drew Catholic students, both graduate and undergraduate, for faith-related discussions and fellowship in the midst of this most secular campus.  So Warren was active in gay life but, by confessing regularly and receiving the sacrament, he cleansed himself of sin and entered into a state of grace that truly uplifted his spirit ... for a while.  He even told me that, if approached by someone whom he found uninteresting, he had the perfect turn-off: "Don't touch me -- I'm in a state of grace!"  He said this jokingly, but perhaps he really resorted to it, though I came to realize that his rebuffs were few and far between.  Yet he planned to leave all this behind and one day marry and become a public school teacher in New Orleans.

     He had already lived for a time in New Orleans, where he became the lover of a young man whose mother was vice-president of a bank.  In no time he found himself a teller in the bank, making good money but under pressures professional, emotional, and spiritual.  One day he cracked up in the teller's cage, throwing money wildly about.  Soon he was in a therapist's office telling his story.  When the therapist had had time to absorb it, he gave quick, unequivocal advice: quit that job and get out of here at once.  The next day Kevin was on a plane to Michigan and his mother's home, after which he in time found his way to New York.  There he entered into another relationship, but this one was tainted from the start by his partner's constant infidelities.  Once, arriving at their apartment, he found the door locked and knew at once the situation.  To get in, he smashed a window, at which point his partner's tguest, terrified, dashed out into the courtyard stark naked, to the amazement and amusement of the neighbors. It was in the wake of this second breakup that I met him; done with relationships, he wanted only one-night stands, followed duly by confession and the sacraments.

     At the Newman Club he met Ann Richards, a graduate student in French whom I knew slightly.  Everything about her was thin, pinched, and dry: a predestined spinster.  She kept apart from the other graduate students, left classes quickly with her lips compressed, eyes down so as to avoid eye contact with anyone.  Knowing me to be a friend of Warren's, in passing she would give me a quick, tight smile, nothing more.  She had a job as monitor in a nearby women's dormitory, where her dour vigilance kept careful watch over the virtue of the residents.  (This was before the anything-goes mood of the Sixties.)  Her tight little world seemed well defended against the secular realm all around her and any hint of a broader, richer experience, until she got to know Warren, whose winsome charm had its effect.  "I have a cold heart," she told him one day, "but you have crept into it."  A guarded confession, but a confession nonetheless, and this from a devout Catholic not given to effusions of emotion.

     "Look!" Warren said to me once, wearing a pair of jeans cut off at the knees.  "New shorts.  Ann cut them off and hemmed them for me.  It didn't cost me a cent."  But she was more than his seamstress.  She helped him with his French, and occasionally I would see them together in a restaurant.  Given Warren's paucity of funds, I'm sure that she was paying.  He was using her, but with her full consent.

     In time I got a teaching job and moved off campus into an apartment of my own.  But I was still in touch with Warren, who kept me informed of his endeavors.  Though a less than brilliant student, he decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to Belgium or France, and to accomplish this goal marshaled all his resources.  A young woman whom he knew at the Newman Club worked in the office that processed the applications.  She explained that the applications would be put in either of two piles: pile A for those considered the most promising, and pile B for all the others.  If his landed in pile B, she would shift it to pile A.

     But Warren didn't stop at that.  Coached by Ann Richards, he set his sights on Columbia's highly esteemed Graduate Department in French, into whose hallowed precincts he had up till now never set foot.  Approaching Professor Bédé, a renowned scholar who specialized in nineteenth-century French literature, in careful French he asked the eminence for a letter of recommendation.  "But young man," said the eminence, "I hardly know you.  You've never taken any of my courses."  "But sir," said Warren, "a recommendation from you would do a lot of good."  Bédé pondered, then announced, "Very well, a supplementary recommendation."  All this in French, with emphasis on supplémentaire.  But Warren got his recommendation.

     Next, still coached by Ann Richards, he went to Jeanne Pleasants, the reigning authority in French phonetics, who also spoke no English.  "It's very rare," she remarked, "for an undergraduate to take an interest in phonetics."  "But madame," said Warren, "phonetics is the basis of the language!"  Jeanne Pleasants beamed.  "Ah, to hear this from an undergraduate!"   So Warren got a second recommendation, supplementary perhaps, but with a stellar name attached.

     Was he overreaching?  One of his friends, apprised of his campaign, blurted out, "You dumb kid, you've got more push than brains!"  This depressed Warren, but I consoled him, my support tempered by the awareness that we both knew there was a measure of truth in the rebuke.  Warren could master irregular verbs, but was at a loss when it came to Flaubert or Proust.  Adept at parroting the opinions of his professors, he couldn't evolve an opinion of his own.  His papers were a pastiche of truisms; rarely, some lived experience of his own broke through.

     Meanwhile Warren was active on other fronts.  He didn't go to bars, since there were so many cruising spots close to home, but somehow he made the acquaintance of an antique dealer who was immediately and irrevocably smitten.  As proof of his fervor the dealer showered gifts on Warren: an antique chair, precious bric-a-brac, a charming little end table, a Tiffany lamp.  Planning one day to have an apartment of his own in New Orleans, Warren shipped item after item home to his mother for storage; what she thought of it all I can't imagine.  In time the dealer's ardor subsided, common sense reclaimed him, and the bonanza stopped.  But not until Warren had feathered his future nest handsomely.

     By now Warren had a job teaching in a Catholic boys' school.  The older boys he found unmanageable, but with the younger ones he had great success.  Soon he was invited to the home of one of them, and the boy's father, the proprietor of a cruise line, offered Warren a job in the purser's office of one of his cruise ships.  So Warren departed with a duffel bag crammed with his thngs and spent a glorious summer in the Caribbean.

     In his absence I happened to have a talk with a young botany instructor, who remarked, "How he uses us all!  He had only to offer a hint to Ann Richards, and she gushed forth money.  And I gave him an A in a botany course where he never even showed his face."  He smiled, shrugged.

     This unsettled me.  I knew that Warren was using us, but didn't know to what extent.  Later that summer my buzzer rang in the middle of the night.  Jarred awake, groggy, and nursing the dimmest hunch as to who it might be, I refused to answer.  The insistent buzzing stopped, but minutes later I heard footsteps in the hall, and a key turning in my lock.  Groping my way to the door, I opened it and saw Warren with his duffel bag, and the building's night attendant, whom he had persuaded to let him in, in the event of my absence.  I grunted acquiescence, waved Warren to a sofa in the living room, and staggered back to bed.  Getting up in the morning, I found him deep in sleep on the sofa, so I breakfasted quietly and went off to teach a morning class.  But I left a note:  "Stop blood-sucking Ann Richards.  Next time you want me to put you up, tell me in advance.  Help yourself to breakfast.  We need to talk. I want you for a friend."

     When I got back to the apartment, Warren and his duffel bag were gone.  He left a note: "I haven't seen Ann Richards for weeks."  Of course not; he'd been off on the cruise.

     Warren didn't get a Fulbright, but he received a lesser scholarship that let him spend a year at a Catholic university in Belgium.  I received one glowing letter from him, telling how he had delivered a talk there to a large audience, marking a transformation of the insecure young student I had known.  I hoped it was true.  But when he came back a year later, he didn't contact me; I heard from others that he had passed through New York.  I never heard from him again.  Perhaps he didn't need me any more; perhaps my note about his blood-sucking had wounded him.  In any event, Warren had thrown me away.

     I hope that Ann Richards found a good teaching job and lived her quiet life.  I hope that Warren Laforgue got to New Orleans, taught there, and married a nice Catholic girl, not too bright, who wouldn't ask too many questions.  I still remember him with fondness.  He was a manipulator, but at least he had deftness and charm.


     I promised liars, cheats, and manipulators in the plural, but so far, confining myself to cases I have personal knowledge of, I have offered only one of each, their offenses strictly limited in scope.  But our history is rich in all three.  As proof of it, I present off the top of my head this list of Americanisms, all verbs meaning to cheat or swindle: to bamboozle, blindside, buffalo, clip, deacon, diddle, fudge, hustle, jive, noodle, pinch, pluck, ream, shave, sucker, humbug, hornswoggle.  All of which -- and I'm sure there are more -- goes to show that this nation has witnessed plenty of lying, cheating, and manipulating.  How could it not, when we had a whole continent to exploit, a nation to build, and new ideas, new religions, new inventions, and new freedoms to thrust at ourselves and the world?  We have always been, and still are, expansive, grabbing all we can, and reaching for more and better.  Boosterism -- a very American notion -- comes easily to us, and boosters are given to exaggeration and enthusiasm, which can easily shade into lying, cheating, and manipulating, with consequences often vast in scope.  I'll cite just an example or two.

     The recent resentencing of Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of the Enron Corporation, reminds me of that colossal fraud, leading to what was then the biggest bankruptcy in the nation's history, with dire consequences for employees, shareholders, and the citizens of Houston.  Skilling was convicted of conspiracy, securities fraud, false statements to auditors, and insider trading -- a rather heavy load of offenses -- and was sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in prison and fined $45 million.  Now his sentence has been cut by ten years, making him eligible for release in 2017.  How former employees and shareholders feel about this, or for that matter the citizens of Houston, has not been reported.  My mutual fund family interviewed Enron twice as a possible investment, but couldn't understand how the company's visible operations could produce the profits reported in its glowing quarterly reports.  "You don't understand modern finance!" the Enron people huffed at them.  Indeed they didn't, and as a result their funds, unlike some, were untouched by Enron's collapse.

     The Enron fraud was based in Houston, but over the years Wall Street has seen lots of dubious promotions, usually ending in collapse.  In the nineteenth century it was canals and turnpikes, then railroads and gold mines and petroleum stocks, all of them touted wildly on Wall Street, some of the enterprises sound, but their stocks uplifted -- for a while -- into the stratosphere.  Recently it was the dot com bubble of the 1990s, and then real estate, from which we are still recovering.  Boom and bust, boom and bust -- that's what our history is all about, and in most of these pies Wall Street has had its sticky fingers deeply implanted.  A parade, often colorful, of liars, cheats, and manipulators.

     In the nineteenth century, in the absence of any federal currency, paper money was also issued by states, cities, counties, private banks, railroads, stores, churches, and even individuals.  Ironically, the money of big New York City banks with solid assets was highly esteemed throughout the rest of the country, and rightly so.  (How times have changed!)  All this ended in the 1860s when, during the Civil War, the federal government started issuing greenbacks, a national currency that replaced all other currencies.  Were those earlier currencies the works of liars, cheats, and manipulators?  Theoretically, no.  But when the issuers went bankrupt, rendering their currency valueless, one might well think so.


A dollar bill issued by a bridge company in New Jersey.  Would you have accepted it? 


      In a mode more comic than serious, consider the nineteenth-century theater company that toured the West advertising the "gowrow," a fabulous monster exhibited in a tent adorned with a lurid painting of an ferocious animal devouring a family of mountaineers.  Lured by such promotion, a crowd would gather outside the tent, forking over good money for tickets to what promised to be the show of shows.  Suddenly, bloodcurdling roars and shrieks would erupt inside the tent, with clanking chains, gunshots, and sounds of a struggle.  A man would stagger out, his clothes shredded, with blood running down his face: "Run for your lives!  The gowrow has broken loose!"  The back of the tent then collapsed amid more roars and sounds of rattling chains.  Needless to say, the crowd fled in panic without stopping to get their money back, at which point the theater troupe packed up quickly and took off for distant vistas where the hoax was still unknown.


Signs of the recent bust, 2008.
The truth about
     Maybe sophisticated New Yorkers wouldn't have fallen for such a hoax, but over the years they have been suckered by subtler schemes, as for instance the Wall Street bubbles mentioned earlier.  Of course not everyone invests, but advertising reaches us all, and what does it involve if not lying, cheating, and manipulating?  Classic examples are the patent medicines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which promised cures for cancer, rheumatism, syphilis, self-abuse (aka masturbation), impotence, toothache, consumption, catarrh, dyspepsia, and anything else you care to name.











     I've seen whole pages of those ads in old newspapers, but patent medicines were also touted in posters slapped on fences and horsecars and on asbestos curtains in theaters; on the signs of sandwichmen on crowded city streets; in handbills slipped under the entrances of residences; in outsized graffiti on the Palisades, where excursionists on steamboats couldn't help but see them; and on telegraph poles beside the Union Pacific tracks across the continent.  "Ob-scenery!" proclaimed Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, but if citizens scoffed at the ads or criticized them, they also bought.



Cocaine for kids: an interesting proposition.






     In one column of ads, a remedy for self-abuse and another (Santal-midi) for gonorrhea; remedies to enlarge certain parts of the body and to restore manhood; a Golden Specific for drunkenness; a cure for weak men (syphilis, gonorrhea, and "all private diseases"); a cure for weak nerves caused by "youthful errors"; sandalwood capsules for gonorrhea; and tansy pills "for women's salvation."  This last, mysterious enough, is probably a discreet reference to yet another venereal disease remedy.  The fate of those who tried these remedies I cannot bring myself to contemplate.

     










   













Our friend and protector?     Of course patent medicines are a thing of the distant past.  Today, the FDA protects us from such scandalous offerings, does it not?  Surely we aren't lied to, cheated, and manipulated in so gross a fashion now.  Not by Big Pharma or Big Tobacco or the food and supplement industries, or by the gun industry or anyone else offering products to satisfy our craving for money, comfort, beauty, pleasure, health.  Books could be written on this subject, and have been.  I'll simply mention the journal Nature's charge in 2005 that 70% of FDA panels writing clinical guidelines on prescription drug usage contained at least one member with financial ties to drug companies whose products were covered by those guidelines.  The FDA has since implemented new guidelines to avoid such conflicts of interest, but criticisms continue.  Caveat emptor. 


     Election note:  Speaking of liars, cheats, and manipulators, our local elections here in the Big Apple can be highly entertaining, if one has an appetite for farce.  First, Anthony Weiner, who had to resign his House seat when his pornographic e-mails to a number of women came to light, has resurfaced as a candidate for mayor, asking voters to give him a second chance, and shaking up an otherwise dull campaign.  He is now neck-and-neck with Christine Quinn, hitherto the favorite, who yearns to be the city's first woman mayor and first avowed gay mayor.  Hot on the heels of this development came the news that Eliot Spitzer, our former mayor who had to resign when his planned rendezvous with a pricey call girl was revealed (see vignette #14, July 1, 2012), is now a candidate for city comptroller, an important but lackluster post that manages the city's multibillion-dollar pension system and oversees the city's finances.  And in the latest poll he's actually the front runner!  My reaction?  Well at least things are getting more interesting.  They both have name recognition, though not the kind most candidates want.  Weiner must be a good campaigner to have gotten this far so fast.  As for Spitzer, he was a superb state attorney general, doing all the things the federal attorney general should have been doing, and -- briefly -- a lousy mayor who antagonized everyone, even his friends.  But he's provoked a massive backlash, and if he's got business, unions, Wall Street, and the Democratic establishment against him, he must be doing something right.  Not that I've decided to vote for either, but I'm watching closely with interest this resurgence of two political outcasts as they rise like the phoenix from the ashes of their earlier career.  Meanwhile the late-night comedians are having a ball.  Jay Leno, the Times informs me, has referred to them as the Peter Tweeter and the Hooker Booker.  And commenting on the possibility that a former madam might also run for comptroller, Leno remarked, "There's a tough choice for the voters.  One is involved in the most degrading profession of all time, and the other ran a whorehouse."  Yes, the election is getting to be fun!

     Coming soon: Secrets of New York (Browder version), featuring mystery houses, a secret meadow, Moses' Folly, a boat graveyard, and two thousand birds in flight.


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder