The Epic of New York City (60 page)

Tweed's lips quivered as the judge then sentenced him to 12 years in prison and fined him $12,750. The date was November 19, 1873.

But the court of appeals soon reduced Tweed's sentence to a mere year in jail and a token fine of $250. When Tweed was registered at the Tombs, the warden asked his occupation. Chins held high, Tweed replied, “Statesman.” Religion? “I have none.” In the Tombs the Boss enjoyed relative luxury, for he occupied a room, not a cell. Cracked windows were replaced with new glass panes, the floor was covered with a dark-green rug, five chairs were provided for visitors, and the famous prisoner could ease his bulk into either a leather lounge or a rocking chair.

Tweed later was removed to the county's grim penitentiary on Blackwells Island. While he sat it out there, Samuel J. Tilden was elected governor for having helped put the Boss behind bars, and a new law enabled the state to sue for money stolen from the public treasury.

Tweed served the full year. The day of his release he was rearrested because a $6,000,000 civil suit had been filed against him. Bail was set at the unheard-of sum of $3,000,000. Unable to provide this security, Tweed was taken to the Ludlow Street Jail for debtors. This county jail, located in the rear of the Essex Market, extended from Ludlow to Essex Street. As a member of the county board of supervisors, Tweed had overseen construction of the brick prison, in which he now became an unwilling guest. Each of its eighty-seven cells was ten feet square, but the Boss occupied the warden's quarters, consisting of two rooms. There Tweed took up residence on January 15, 1875.

How much did the Tweed Ring steal? The exact amount will never be known because the reformers couldn't find every document
revealing the true figures. But apparently Tweed and his henchmen filched about $30,000,000 in cash. Considering the bribes paid to the ring by rich men for cutting their taxes, the plunder from the rigged sale of franchises, the issuance of bonds at extravagant interest rates, plus the sale of other privileges, taxpayers probably lost a total of $200,000,000.

What happened to Tweed's cronies? None suffered so much as the Boss himself. Cunningly having assigned their spoils to their wives, brothers, and close friends, most of them fled to Canada, England, and Europe. Mayor Hall was tried, but when a juror died, the trial had to be called off; at his second trial he was acquitted. Judge Barnard was impeached. Judge Cardozo resigned under pressure. Judge McCunn was deposed and died of heartbreak three days later. The new city fathers, realizing that the loot was beyond the law's reach, promised immunity to Connolly, Sweeny, Garvey, and others if they would give back part of the swag. How much did the city recover? After all expenses had been deducted, a mere $876,241 of the $30,000,000 to $200,000,000 that had been stolen.

Tweed's Fifth Avenue mansion and other properties were attached to repay a portion of his thievery. On October 8, 1875, the state supreme court denied his appeal from the huge civil suit pending against him. The Boss worried about his fate if he lost this new case. Meantime, his status as a prisoner was more like the life of Riley than that of Jean Valjean. Almost every afternoon he strolled out of the Ludlow Street Jail, flanked by two guards, stepped into a carriage, drove to the sparcely settled northern section of the city, took a pleasant walk, and then stopped to dine with his wife en route back to jail.

Late in the afternoon of December 4, 1875, Tweed got out of the carriage in front of the brownstone house his family now occupied at 647 Madison Avenue, between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth streets. On that day's outing he was accompanied by William M. Tweed, Jr.; Warden Dunham; and a deputy keeper, named Edward Hagan. As Tweed walked up the stoop, he looked for and found a secret mark on one of the steps. Once inside the four men sat down in the parlor, where they were joined by Tweed's son-in-law. Darkness fell, and the gas lamps were lighted. About 6:15
P.M
. the Boss said that he would like to go upstairs to see his wife. He left. Five minutes later the warden turned to young Tweed and said they'd better leave. Tweed's son climbed the stairs. A moment later he clattered back down,
shouting that he couldn't find his father. Tweed's overcoat still hung on a rack in the hall, but he had escaped. While the warden and deputy keeper nervously searched the house, young Tweed tugged at his hair and screamed that his father had ruined the family.

Tweed had paid $60,000 for help in making his getaway. He may have had the assistance of a smuggler, named Lawrence, with whom he had struck up a friendship in the Ludlow Street Jail. The faint mark on the stoop had told Tweed that this was the chosen day. Instead of going upstairs in his home, Tweed had walked out the back door and cut through his backyard to Fourth (now Park) Avenue. The split second he reached the avenue, a wagon drew up close, and a man's hand reached out and groped toward him. Another confederate, posing as a pedestrian, muttered, “All right—get in!” Tweed crawled into the wagon, and once inside he was covered up. The vehicle jogged across town to a Hudson River pier, where the Boss was transferred to a rowboat. Under the cover of December darkness he was rowed to the New Jersey shore.

After landing, he was whisked to an old farmhouse in a lonely wooded area back of the Palisades, and there he hid for three months. He shaved off his whiskers, clipped his hair, donned a wig, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. So far as any rambler could tell, he was an infirm gentleman, named John Secor, who needed rest and fresh air. Following his ninety-day confinement in New Jersey, Tweed was smuggled to a shad fisherman's hut on Staten Island.

From there a small schooner took him to Florida, and for a while he hid out in the Everglades. Next, he rode a fishing smack to Santiago, Cuba. He left Santiago in a bark, named the
Carmen,
and on September 6, 1876, landed at Vigo, Spain. By this time he had been traced to Cuba, where it was learned that he had departed for Spain. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish asked Spanish authorities to arrest Tweed. Although Spain and the United States had no mutual extradition treaty, the Spaniards voluntarily obliged. They sent to London for a photograph of Tweed, but none being available, they used a Nast caricature of the Boss.

Tweed was arrested, and the U.S. cruiser
Franklin
sped from the Mediterranean to Spain to bring him back to America. When the ship steamed into New York Harbor, the broken Boss was transferred to a tug that put him ashore at Pier 46, where a curious crowd had gathered. Tweed was now gaunt and poor. Picking his way down a
plank from tug to pier, he lost his balance, fell forward, and tumbled into a heap of coal.

Back in the Ludlow Street Jail, Tweed learned that his fair-weather friends had escaped prosecution by turning state's evidence and returning part of their loot. He raged. For the first time he offered to confess everything and did so—fruitlessly. He later said that he had been promised his freedom if he would testify, but the promise was not kept. Cared for in jail by a faithful Negro servant, recognizing passersby, and reciting their personal histories, Tweed finally caught a cold that developed into bronchial pneumonia. He began to die on the morning of April 12, 1878. That noon the clock on the nearby Essex Market started to bong the hour, and just as its last stroke reverberated throughout the jail, William Marcy Tweed died.

Chapter 27

P
ROGRESS
was the magic word in the latter nineteenth century. In New York, as elsewhere in America, the prevailing mood was an optimistic faith that everything was fated to get bigger and better, that people would become richer and happier. Science was a ringmaster taming wild nature, a horn of plenty pouring out so many inventions that progress seemed inevitable.

In this spirit, and while Boss Tweed still languished in jail, some notable New Yorkers gathered on the evening of May 11, 1877, in the Hotel St. Denis, at Broadway and Eleventh Street. They came to watch Professor Alexander Graham Bell, of Boston, demonstrate a strange new device, called the speaking telephone. He proved that
he could speak to an assistant two miles away in Brooklyn. Bell's success that night marked the beginning of New York's place in telephone history.

Six days later the first interstate telephone conversation was held between a man in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Bell in Chickering Hall, at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Soon the renowned vaudeville team of Edward “Ned” Harrigan and Tony Hart presented a sketch, called
The Telephone,
on the stage of the Theatre Comique, at Broadway near Spring Street.

The Telephone Company of New York was incorporated in August, 1877, but it failed. In the autumn of 1878 the Bell Telephone Company of New York was organized. The next March it opened New York's first commercial telephone exchange at 82 Nassau Street, and the following autumn the city got a telephone directory, a small card bearing 252 names. The first telephone operators were boys, but soon they were replaced by bustle-wearing girls. Instead of starting a telephone conversation by saying, “Hello,” subscribers shouted, “Ahoy!”

The New York Stock Exchange got its first telephone in 1879. Five years later the first regular long-distance service in history went into operation between New York and Boston; in 1885, between New York and Philadelphia; and in 1892, between New York and Chicago. Telephone concerts became the rage, piano solos played in Philadelphia and elsewhere being heard in New York.

Rich people enjoyed the convenience of telephones, but almost everyone complained about the telephone wires cobwebbing the sky. Telegraph wires had been bad enough. In the bitter winter of 1874-75 ice had felled telegraph poles and wires all over the city, and mounted fireman, called Cowboys, patrolled the slick streets, warning pedestrians against the danger of live wires. In 1878 a British visitor wrote: “In the old or lower part of the city . . . against the sky, you look upon a perfect maze of telephone and telegraph wires crossing and recrossing each other from the tops of houses. The sky, indeed, is blackened with them, and it is as though you were looking through the meshes of a net.”

That year, 1878, William C. Whitney, the city's corporation counsel, said that communication firms needed no special authority to bury their wires and cables under the streets, but die companies were slow to spend money for such a changeover. In 1881 the first underground telephone cables were laid in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and the next year Boston followed suit. In 1884 the New York state legislature
ordered “all telegraph, telephone and electric light wires and cables” removed from the surface of New York's streets before November 1, 1885.

The law had little effect. Telephone poles rose to 50 feet, then to 60, 70, and 80. In 1887, 90-foot telephone poles were installed along West Street, bordering the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Each was bisected by 30 double crossarms, looking like ladders mounting toward heaven, and each was strung with 300 separate telephone wires. They remained until after the blizzard of 1888.

New York responded to the nineteenth century's avid interest in natural science by founding the American Museum of Natural History. J. Pierpont Morgan was one of seventeen rich men who asked the state legislature for a museum charter. It was granted in 1869. The museum founders soon raised $52,000, with which they bought, among other things, a famous collection of stuffed mammals and birds owned by Prince Maximilian of Germany. This and other early collections were housed at first in the arsenal in Central Park. About eighteen acres of land were acquired along Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first Streets, and in 1874 President Grant laid the cornerstone of the museum's first building.