The Epic of New York City (61 page)

At the site an underground stream—one of many that lace Manhattan—cost the contractor a fortune because he had to divert it and sink foundation walls strong enough to resist the water pressure. This first building, of Victorian Gothic style and later known as the south-central wing, was opened on December 22, 1877, by President Rutherford B. Hayes. By then Morgan had been elected the museum's treasurer, a tide he held for fifteen years. Far from being just an exhibit of old bones and stuffed birds, the museum developed into a dynamic research laboratory, a school for advanced study, a publishing house for scientific manuscripts, the sponsor of exploring parties sent out all over the world, and probably the finest institution of its kind anywhere on earth.

It was a great day for New York's Catholics when St. Patrick's Cathedral was dedicated on May 25, 1879. Except during the Civil War, when construction stopped, passersby for more than twenty years had gawked at laborers hard at work on the Gothic Revival masterpiece. Now that all the scaffolding had been removed and the
grounds tidied up, New York newspapers hailed it as the noblest temple ever raised to the memory of St. Patrick.

Archbishop John Hughes had been succeeded by Brooklyn-born Archbishop John McCloskey, who in 1875 became America's first Roman Catholic cardinal. On the day of dedication a host of Catholic dignitaries, headed by six archbishops and thirty-five bishops, watched solemnly as John Cardinal McCloskey walked around the outside of the Cathedral to bless it. The granite exterior resembled the Cologne Cathedral, and the interior suggested the Cathedral of Amiens—a forest of white marble piers, kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows, dominated by an impressive rose window twenty-six feet in diameter. St. Patrick's ranked eleventh in size among the great cathedrals and churches of the world.

The year 1879 also marked the first use of the name Madison Square Garden. Several years earlier the New York and Harlem Railroad had abandoned its depot on the block bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-seventh Street P. T. Barnum and another showman, named W. C. Coup, leased the property and erected a one-story building with a square four-story tower. They called it the Great Roman Hippodrome. While overseeing the construction job, Coup had a nervous breakdown. He sold his interest to Barnum, who put on entertainment combining the features of a circus, menagerie, and museum. Barnum then sold the place to Patrick S. Gilmore, official bandmaster of the Union army during the Civil War. The best-known bandleader of his day, Gilmore changed the name to Gilmore's Concert Garden. Finally, in 1879, the name was again altered to Madison Square Garden. It was the first of four separate buildings to bear the name, two of them on the original site.

Bullfights were held in New York City in 1880. A promoter, called Angel Fernandez, built a bullring at the corner of 6th (now Lenox) Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem. Downtown New Yorkers got there by taking either the Sixth Avenue or the Third Avenue elevated. That summer billboards announced that “a first-class company of Spanish bull-fighters under the direction of the famous Spanish Espada, Angel Valdemoro,” would be brought to the city for this gala occasion. Puzzled New Yorkers had to be told that
espada
means swordsman.

The bulls were shipped from Texas. The general admission was $1.50, the arena doors opened at 3
P.M
., and the fights began at 5
P.M
. Among the 3,000 to 4,000 persons attending the first of the 3-day fights were parents who dragged along children. Admission for tots under eight was half price. Most youngsters enjoy horror scenes, but these must have been disappointed, for no gore flowed. The rosettes were glued onto the bulls instead of being stuck into them. Rubber caps were placed on the bulls' horns, and the matadors were not allowed to kill the beasts.

More refined diversion than bullfighting was offered New Yorkers in 1880 with the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At a dinner held in Paris about a dozen years earlier, John Hay had suggested that New York City establish a museum not for art's sake, but for the sake of humanity. Hay was a man of cultivated tastes who had served as private secretary to President Lincoln, and when he made this suggestion, he was first secretary of the American legation in the French capital. His idea fired the interest of the Union League Club, and the chairman of its art committee called a meeting to discuss it. Committee members felt ashamed that New York had no art gallery to compare with those already established in several smaller American cities. Poet-editor William Cullen Bryant was named chairman of a committee of fifty to launch a campaign to raise $250,000 for a public art museum. Another patron was J. Pierpont Morgan, who now controlled the Vanderbilt properties.

The museum's first full-time director was Italian-born, American-naturalized Luigi Palma di Cesnola. While serving as American consul to the island of Cyprus from 1865 to 1877, he had excavated Greek and Roman ruins and put together the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, the largest of its kind in the world. His stone sculptures, bronzes, pottery, and the like were bought by the new museum.

Its trustees had acquired property in Central Park along the west side of Fifth Avenue from Eightieth to Eighty-fifth Street. This had been a disgraceful area; nearby Seneca Village, the largest and foulest squatter camp in the park, had stunk up the neighborhood. Now there rose the first permanent wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Until the building was completed, the museum occupied two temporary homes. The first was at 681 Fifth Avenue, in a place once known as Allen Dodworth's Dancing Academy. The large skylighted
dance hall was converted into a picture gallery whose walls were hung with 175 paintings, mostly of Dutch and Flemish masters, brought from Europe. When the growing collection began to overflow the renovated dance hall, the museum moved into its second temporary home, a mansion on the south side of Fourteenth Street just west of Sixth Avenue.

In 1880, when the city's shopping center reached Fourteenth Street, the museum was able to move into its permanent home. The first wing, set well back from Fifth Avenue, was a red brick structure designed in the Tuscan Gothic style. As New York City dedicated one new institution after another, American Presidents were kept busy shuttling back and forth between the national capital and New York. On March 30, 1880, President Hayes formally opened the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It became one of the greatest museums of art on earth.

In the early part of the 1880's New York streets flickered under the glow of gaslights more picturesque than efficient. At twilight it was pleasant to watch lamplighters making their rounds, using a long stick to poke open one side of each square gas lamp, turn on the jet, and set it aflame. But the lights were dim, costly, and troublesome.

A scientist, named Charles Francis Brush, had invented an electric arc light, and by 1879 his creation was illuminating Cleveland's Public Square. In December of that year the first Brush arc lights were installed in New York on Broadway from Fourteenth to Twenty-sixth Street. By July, 1880, Brush had erected one 6,000-candlepower lamp atop a 160-foot pole in Madison Square and another in Union Square. They could be seen from the Orange Mountains of New Jersey 16 miles away, but their dazzling brilliance was unbearable at close range. Women complained that the lamps made their faces look ghostly white.

At this time Thomas Alva Edison was “fired with the idea of an incandescent lamp as opposed to the arc lamp,” as he expressed it. Born in Ohio of a Dutch father and Scottish mother, young Edison had only three months of formal schooling. He was tutored by his mother and at the age of twelve read
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He went to work as a tramp telegraph operator but vowed that he would become an inventor. In late May or early June, 1869, he arrived in New York for the first time, nearly penniless and
deep in debt. The only friend he had here was not at home, so the boyish-looking twenty-two-year-old trudged the streets the whole night through.

The next few days he lived on 5-cent meals of apple dumplings and coffee. That infamous Black Friday when Gould and Fisk tried to corner the gold market, Edison stood on a telegraph booth to watch in wide-eyed wonder as men went mad and fortunes were lost. Amid the frenzy a telegraph operator held out his hand and cried, “Shake, Edison! We're okay. We haven't a cent.” Edison later said, “I felt happy because we were poor.” By the time of his death his many inventions had spawned business interests worth more than $25,000,000,000; the New York
Times
declared that this gave Edison's brain the highest cash value in history.

The quality, utility, and volume of his brainchildren quickly brought financial independence. By 1876 Edison had taken out 122 patents. By 1878 he had a home and laboratory at Menlo Park, 7 miles northeast of New Brunswick, New Jersey. He searched 13 long months for an incandescent lamp to replace the arc lamp. At last he discovered carbonized cotton filaments and produced a light bulb that burned 40 hours.

The first public demonstration of Edison's new electric lamp was held at Menlo Park on December 31, 1879. Two days later the “Wizard of Menlo Park” held a special preview for New York City aldermen. He had strung his lamps along wires so that he could light or extinguish any bulb without affecting the others. Although the aldermen were impressed, they did not care to spend city money to subsidize Edison's plan to light the sidewalks of New York. After all, the Brush Electric Illuminating Company of New York was already doing that job.

Edison appealed to private investors, and soon the Edison Electric Illuminating Company was incorporated with a capitalization of $1,000,000 to light stores and homes. Officials of the various gas companies, aware of Edison's great reputation, watched his every move with glum eyes, hoping that he would fail. The creation of a central power station and commercial lighting system was the biggest project Edison had ever undertaken. All the equipment had to be “home-devised and home-made,” as Edison put it.

J. Pierpont Morgan, the financier, always welcomed new ideas. In January, 1881, he went to New Jersey to find out for himself if Edison's fights could be used to illuminate private homes. (Back in
1859 a professor, named Moses Gerrish Farmer, had lighted his own parlor in Salem, Massachusetts, with lamps powered by a galvanic battery in the cellar.) Edison convinced Morgan that an electric lighting system could be installed in a house. The banker promised that when he moved to 219 Madison Avenue, he would buy an Edison system. Before Morgan changed residences, however, James Hood Wright had installed a generating plant in his home in the Fort Washington section of Manhattan.

In the autumn of 1882 Morgan moved his family to Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street, and soon thereafter the renovated house was wired for electricity. Morgan's son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee, said in his biography of the banker:

Edison, too busy to give the Morgan house personal attention, promised his stockholders that his commercial generating station would begin operations almost any day. To impress the men who counted most, he chose to light offices in the financial and communications center of the city. This was an area bounded by Spruce Street on the north, Nassau Street on the west, Wall Street on the south, and Pearl Street on the east. Realtors, aware of the capital Edison had raised, charged him $75,000 for two old four-story buildings at 257 Pearl Street.

He commissioned engineer Charles T. Porter to build six 240-horsepower engines capable of running at a maximum of 700 revolutions per minute. Edison himself went to work on the first of six 110-volt dynamos—“built them by guesswork,” he later admitted. Sensitive to the public anger at overhead wires, Edison elected to run his electric wires under the streets, and in the summer of 1881 gangs of laborers began digging. Electricity was such a strange new phenomenon that most people believed it was a liquid that might flow into their basements. To educate his own workers, Edison opened a night school for them at 65 Fifth Avenue. While his underground tubes were being laid, Edison was summoned to the office of the city commissioner of public works, who snapped, “You are putting down these tubes. You need five inspectors to look after this work. Their salary is five dollars a day. Good morning!”

Edison was constantly on the go, supervising each detail of his monumental project, watching as each connection was made, and trusting no one to do things right. At night he stretched out on piles of pipes in the growing power station and fell asleep instantly. By October 1, 1882, he had strung wires into the homes of 59 customers, and although the power had not yet been turned on, there was a great demand for securities in his company. Issued with a par value of $100 per share, this stock advanced rapidly—sometimes as much as $100
an hour.
It rose to $500 a share, then $3,000, then $5000, then $8,000. Gashouse workers grumbled that soon they would lose their jobs. But by the time Edison inaugurated his commercial lighting system, he had only 85 homes fully wired with a total load of 400 bulbs.