Conquering Gotham Read online

  On one block small boys in knickers and girls in pinafores gathered round the itinerant knife sharpeners. The next block north was heavily black, families from Georgia and Virginia escaping the Jim Crow South. It was all a bit rough and there were clumps of young men standing about, their derbies at a rakish angle. They toiled as railroad porters, hotel porters, waiters, launderers, stable hands, and cooks. Just over a year before, on a hot August night, this stretch of Eighth Avenue had been the scene of a short-lived race riot set off by a drunken black man stabbing a white policeman to death in a saloon a bit uptown. Long-smoldering “hard feelings” had erupted and mobs of white locals rampaged, randomly attacking Negroes, dragging men off passing streetcars and beating them. The blacks gave as good as they got. By midnight, Tammany police, having at times joined in the attack against the Negroes, finally imposed peace.

  When Baldwin crossed the filthy cobblestones of Eighth Avenue, the stench of the stockyards was just discernible when the wind blew off the Hudson. Continuing on toward the river, he found on both sides “decent, respectable but cheap grade apartment and boarding houses, the entire block.” Invariably the old-clothes men plied their trade here, looking for worn but serviceable garments. The 1900 census had listed many Americans of German and Irish extraction employed as ice men, actors, musicians, bartenders, detectives, and milliners. Possibly some worked at the block’s numerous modest Italian restaurants.

  New York saloon at the turn of the century.

  At Ninth Avenue, the IRT’s elevated tracks cast the street in a permanent state of shadow while the jammed electric trolley cars clanged along, vying with the many teams of horses and ever more common motorcars, status symbols of the rich and daring. Here Baldwin noted the many small stores, the ubiquitous corner saloons, and a very tall, weathered brick wall that enclosed the whole blockfront on the far side of West Thirty-third Street. Behind that wall loomed the venerable Institution for the Blind.

  Down several blocks on West Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets were many bars: “drinking places are fitted up in the most lavish Oriental style and are known by such names as the Cairo Smoking Room, Bohemian Palm Garden, and similar names designed to attract the patronage of the Tenderloin all-nighters.” The Tenderloin was not surprisingly, according to the police, “the center for the criminal classes. No one interfered with them…Even if outrages occurred they [the police] knew they were not to interfere as the [whore]houses had paid the captain for protection…I heard once of an [police] officer of the name of Coleman, who was killed in a disorderly house, and there never has been an inquest or an arrest.” Clearly, building a huge new railroad station here could—if the surrounding neighborhood remained unchanged—present certain predictable problems.

  Heading back on Thirty-third Street, Baldwin passed a “good class of apartment houses, with respectable boarding houses. There is a Baptist Church in the center of the block.” The huge brick Haeger Storage Warehouse fronted on Eighth Avenue. In the next block of Thirty-third Street, Baldwin saw mainly “boarding houses and tenements of a cheap class. There are a couple of stables, Chinese Laundries and insignificant small stores.” Over on Sixth Avenue, yet another elevated line rumbled north and south. Every single building and institution Baldwin had just seen would have to be bought. It was a gigantic and complex undertaking, fraught with possibilities for failure.

  Some of the roughest Tenderloin joints, wild dance halls like the Tivoli, the Sans Souci, and the Egyptian Hall, were closer to Fifth Avenue but would still set a low tone for the neighborhood. The most famous was Eddie Grey’s huge, raucous Haymarket at West Thirtieth and Sixth Avenue, in the shadows of the El. Painted bilious yellow and ablaze with outside lights, the Haymarket’s prominent hanging sign promised Grand Soiree Dansant! Inside, past the chief bouncer, Weeping Willie, smoky chaos prevailed every night, with blaring music, overpriced champagne (“wealthy water”), swirling crowds of men dancing the waltz and the two-step with pretty and willing women, frequent fights, and curtained cubicles upstairs in the galleries for lascivious private shows or sexual encounters. One longtime habitué recalled that for female patrons “Rule No. 1 was that no man who fell for them was to be robbed on the premises.”

  Anyone abroad in the Tenderloin late at night had to beware. In the tenebrous side streets the hardened criminal classes held sway, and brazen streetwalkers lured unwary rubes to panel houses where sliding bedroom walls made stealing watches and wallets easy. Murder was not unknown either. Just as Wall Street gloried in its fearful financial power, so the Tenderloin gloried in its lurid menu of vice and corruption—luxurious French brothels with “cinema nights,” high-stakes gaming halls, “badger” games, and opulent opium joints. Every professional gambler, saloonkeeper, white slaver, and madame in the Tenderloin dutifully bribed the police and worked to fleece the unwary. The Democrats of Tammany Hall turned a blind eye to what reformers had long denounced as Satan’s Circus. And just as many a tourist had to see Wall Street, so many of the men among them had to see the Tenderloin.

  New York night life in the Gilded Age.

  By the time Alexander Cassatt set his heart on his Manhattan tunnels and terminal, the Tenderloin and its flourishing culture of Tammany police-protected vice had been thoroughly investigated and exposed (to little avail) by two state legislative committees. The first, the Lexow Committee, had deposed (among many others) the infamous “Clubber” Williams, who admitted, noted the New York Times in 1894, that “on a salary of $2,750 a year, [he] has a country place, a steam yacht, a considerable number of bank accounts, and some real estate in the city,” leading the newspaper to perorate: “That he is the most outrageous ruffian on the police force is…a matter of common knowledge. That he is one of the richest men on the police force has been…a matter of common belief.” “I’m so well known in this city,” Captain Williams boasted, “that the car horses nod to me in the morning.” Williams claimed to have made his vast sums investing in real estate in Japan. Still, he decided it best to retire when summoned by then reform police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.

  William Baldwin could only hope as he concluded his inspection of these rundown blocks that the building of a great railroad terminal in the heart of the Tenderloin would dramatically cleanse it of vice and crime.

  EIGHT

  “CROOKED AND GREEDY”

  Just as policeman Clubber Williams thought it wise to resign after his grilling by Lexow, Tammany Democratic chieftain Richard Croker, the epitome of disciplined corruption, thought it best to decamp to England for self-imposed exile lest he be called to testify. “Like many other millionaires, Croker had come up the hard way,” writes historian Lloyd Morris. “Stern-visaged, cold-eyed, with the heavy body of a bruiser, he was a study in iron grey—hair, beard, handsome suit, and overcoat were all of the same dark hue. Croker, the child of poor Irish immigrants, had landed in New York in 1846, at the age of three. He had little schooling, a rough youth as a member of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, got on the city payroll in his early twenties, served as alderman in the regime of Boss Tweed, was tried for murder after an Election Day battle and set free because the jury disagreed. But all this was now far in the past.” Still that past cast a powerful shadow and few dared to cross Boss Croker.

  In England, the thuggish Croker moulted into an approximation of British gentry, sporting the proper (if unconvincing) plumage of formal suit, gleaming top hat, and expensive cane. He acquired the requisite London town house, stables near Newmarket racecourse, and a moated country estate in Wantage, Berkshire. There Croker indulged his every whim and his passion for expensive horses, cutting an unlikely figure on the English turf and racing circuit with his trademark black cigar clenched in his mouth.

  New York Democratic boss William Croker at the race track.

  The less polite New York press quickly dubbed Croker the “Baron of Wantage,” and gleefully reported the Tammany boss’s new hobby of raising world champion bulldogs, with one famous puppy rumored to
cost ten thousand dollars. But, wrote one biographer, “Croker’s greatest fun was feeding the pigs. These he had named after New York politicians whom he knew to be crooked and greedy.” Thanks to the miracle of the telegraph, Croker could play the English squire even as he ran the Tammany Wigwam with an autocratic iron fist. He deigned to return to Manhattan (he had another horse farm in New Jersey) in formal sartorial glory only to manage crises and direct strategic elections.

  With his simian air of ferocious, sullen reserve, he exuded an intensely intimidating power dedicated to horses, graft, and politics. For decades, Tammany Hall had ruled through a very simple formula, explained by Croker in a rare interview: “Think of the hundreds of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. There is not a mugwump [reformer] who would shake hands with them…Tammany looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes them citizens in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there…If we go down into the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter.”

  It was really quite elementary, wrote muckraker Lincoln Steffens: Tammany owned the “plain people” because in the absence of government services, Tammany provided a helping hand. “They speak pleasant words, smile friendly smiles, notice the baby, give picnics up the River or the Sound, or a slap on the back; find jobs, most of them at city expense, but they also have news-stands, peddling privileges, railroad and other business places to dispense.” And with those votes, Tammany ruled city government and its tens of thousands of jobs and the vast ocean of boodle harvested from controlling the docks, the police, the health department, and the courts. It was a reliably rich take. The Pennsylvania Railroad could make it even richer.

  Along with Croker the other virtual political dictator of New York was U.S. Senator Thomas Collier Platt, fifteen-year absolute monarch of the state Republican machine and legislature. Platt had the look of a pallid haberdasher’s clerk and cared only for the minutiae and power of politics. Unlike the men of Tammany, whose “offices” were generally located in neighborhood saloons (though few top leaders ever touched a drop of liquor), the “Easy Boss” (as he was known) held court each Sunday in the “Amen Corner” of the plush Fifth Avenue Hotel. There he had long lived with his wife (though now he was a widower), and endlessly parsed elections and appointments and made deals with loyal leaders who came on pilgrimage from all over the Empire State. In his first stint in the U.S. Senate, Platt was derided by journalist William Allen White as a political “dwarf.” When Platt entered the U.S. Senate for the second time in 1897, White described him as cutting “a small figure. He was a negligible man…He took no active interest in the large trend of national events…he was miserable until the tedious business of a session was done. Then back at his express office, or sitting at his desk in the Fifth Avenue, he could gloat over his power.”

  New York Republican boss Thomas Platt.

  Unlike Richard Croker and others of the Gilded Age bossocracy, Senator Platt did not steal, nor did he, wrote even his nemesis Theodore Roosevelt, “use his political position to advance his private fortunes…He lived in hotels and had few extravagant tastes.” In contrast to Tammany and its legions of poor, immigrant voters, Platt’s supreme power came from catering to the great trusts and corporations doing business in Albany. Their grateful largesse flowed into Platt’s formidable Republican campaign chest. Platt distributed these dollars with strategic care to his chosen candidates and district leaders during elections. Total fealty ensued. Platt’s word had long been the law up in Albany at the state legislature.

  William Baldwin and Alexander Cassatt would soon have to navigate the political waters where these two very different men had long reigned supreme. A construction project of the magnitude they planned—sixteen miles of tunnels, a monumental terminal, and a huge rail yard—could not move forward without all manner of franchises and legislation at every level of government.

  Theodore Roosevelt had, of course, been a great and unhappy exception to Platt’s usual ways; Platt had backed him for governor only under severe duress. As hero of San Juan Hill and famous for his probity and honesty, Teddy seemed the only Republican candidate likely to win the governorship in the wake of a particularly rank embezzling scandal. Due to the assassination of President McKinley, the obstreperous and unreliable Teddy had triumphed, joyfully ascending to the Bully Pulpit of the presidency. Alas, Senator Platt had also miscalculated when he rammed through legislation creating Greater New York City, in the hopeful (but deluded) belief that the new outer boroughs would furnish more Republicans than Democrats, and thus a juicy plum for his party. Instead, it had created more boodle for Croker and the Democrats, who in 1897 had installed Robert Van Wyck as first mayor of consolidated Greater New York.

  In truth, Croker and Platt often coexisted peacefully, divvying up Gotham’s plentiful spoils. But in 1899, the Easy Boss could not resist twisting the Tammany Tiger’s tail by unleashing the second state investigation (known as the Mazet Committee) into Gotham’s lubricious graft and corruption. This time the brooding Richard Croker himself was forced to take the stand and testily admit to pocketing Tammany rake-offs from judges (at $10,000 per) and others. The prosecutor asked, “Then you are working for your pocket, are you not?” Croker snapped back with words that acquired instant infamy and immortality, “All the time; the same as you.” The drawn-out hearings, filling five fat volumes worth of testimony, revealed the long-entrenched system of vice and police protection to be more flagrant than ever, a fact of little moment to the great mass of Tammany voters. What Mazet confirmed about the ice business was altogether another matter.

  In May 1900, as the weather warmed, New Yorkers buying ice—an absolute necessity for keeping milk and meat from spoiling—had been stunned to hear the price had inexplicably doubled from thirty cents a hundred pounds to sixty cents. In the tenement districts, the poor wanting to buy the cheap five-cent pieces were turned away. Ice was for sale only in one hundred-pound blocks. Young William Randolph Hearst’s crusading Journal American unleashed its best lawyers and reporters, demanding in giant headlines “PUT AN END TO THE CRIMINAL EXTORTION OF THE ICE TRUST.” Day after day, Hearst pounded away, splashing heartrending cartoons across the American’s front page to drive home the infamy of it all. In “The Ice Trust and the Poor” a weeping young waif clad in rags stood by her feverish, bedridden mother, murmuring, “Can’t get any ice, mamma; the trust man says they won’t sell any more small pieces to poor people.”

  Hearst eventually dug up the scandalous and Augean truth: the Ice Trust was the creation of Tammany officials, including Gotham’s own mayor, Robert Van Wyck. The scheme was simple: Only their company’s ice barges could unload on city-owned piers. Over in Wantage, Richard Croker was sufficiently displeased to prepare to return to Gotham. Grafting off the poor (and getting caught red-handed) was bad Tammany politics.

  The Mazet hearings roiled up all kinds of vile murk. Hundreds of witnesses detailed a debauched underworld—brothels, “panel” houses where thieves stole wallets from unsuspecting men engaged in sex, “cinema nights” where voyeurs paid to secretly peep into rooms where whores were plying their trade, new legions of prostitutes operating out of tenement houses full of young children, and, most horrifying, the rise of white slavery. The respectable newspapers found it hard to cover the story. Tammany police had become so greedy that denizens of the underworld were pleased to expose them. One witness, proprietor of the White Elephant in the Tenderloin, complained about the outsized bribes police now demanded. He also testified, “There are more gambling houses and more disorderly [whore]houses open, running business openly, a great many more.” Police chief Richard Devery, a bloated buffoon grown immensely rich on graft, denied all, saying with his trademark smirk, “Touchin’ on the question of gambling, I’ll say that when the department gets evidence it will act…We will act any time on the complaint of reputable citizens.”

  Certain reform-minded
middle-class citizens, infuriated by the Mazet dirt, had decided to call the insufferable Chief Devery’s bluff. He wanted evidence of crime and corruption? They would bombard Tammany with all the evidence Big Bill Devery could ask for. Their leader was the charismatic William Baldwin, president of the Long Island Rail Road. At rallies and meetings, the handsome young Baldwin exhorted his listeners to action: “Last fall there arose in this city a cry, an agonized cry, from fathers, mothers, and daughters, that vice was rampant in the city. It was a cry for help that scarcely anybody could endure. It was out of this…that the Committee of Fifteen was born.” The committee raised money, hired private detectives, and sent them forth to methodically gather evidence and force prosecutions. There were some who saw in the activist young Baldwin a potential future mayor. After all, he was young, smart, good-looking, a hard worker, a respected businessman, and a very winning personality. And he got results. The reformers, true to their word, month after month stacked up ample proof of gambling, graft, and prostitution.

  All the hue and cry led one Tammany district leader, the redoubtable George Washington Plunkitt, to daintily explicate about “honest graft and dishonest graft.” The latter, which he did not care for, relied on “blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc…. [Then]there’s an honest graft…say, they’re going to lay a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it…I buy up all the land I can…Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit…Well, that’s honest graft.” These were exactly the sort of sentiments that made the Pennsylvania Railroad chary as it contemplated embarking on the nation’s largest civil engineering project in the heart of Gotham.

  Meanwhile, letters and phone calls poured in to Baldwin’s reform group from New Yorkers angry about local riffraff and criminals. Between those and the Fifteen’s own private inquiries, the president of the LIRR had come to obtain his firsthand education about many of the very blocks in the Tenderloin that the PRR now needed to buy. On West Thirty-first Street, warned one caller, right behind the Nineteenth Precinct police station house, “four or five houses are regular houses of ill-fame. Soliciting is going on from the windows.” Another wrote furiously about a saloon on the ground floor of his Seventh Avenue apartment building, “a dive of the worst character…The most vile and filthiest streetwalkers in the neighborhood, white and colored, are harbored in this place all day from sunrise till long after midnight, much to the disgust and annoyance of the tenants, all respectable people.”