The Epic of New York City (76 page)

Green was educated in an academy in his hometown of Worcester, groomed himself for West Point, gave up the idea of entering the army, became a clerk in a New York store, studied law, and entered into legal partnership with Samuel J. Tilden. Then he developed into a civic leader of vast ability and unspotted integrity. His activities
were so various and his influence so great that it is difficult to understand how one man could accomplish so much.

As city comptroller, he reestablished the city's credit following the Tweed scandals. He planned the American Museum of Natural History. He founded the New York Zoological Society. He established the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. He devised the plan to consolidate the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations as the New York Public Library. He was president of the Central Park commission, and a bench placed in the park honored him as “directing genius of Central Park in its formative period.”

A man with a clear mind and forceful personality, Green had a strong nose, sunken eyes and a gray beard. For thirty years he was obsessed with the idea of creating an “imperial city,” a proposal his enemies called Green's hobby.

Ever since 1686, when the Dongan charter was granted, New York City had consisted of just the island of Manhattan. However, consolidation of areas north, east, and south of Manhattan was predicted in 1857 by Henry C. Murphy, the former Brooklyn mayor who had sparked construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Murphy said, “It requires no spirit of prophecy to foretell the union of New York and Brooklyn at no distant day. The (East) river which divides them will soon cease to be a line of separation, and, bestrode by the colossus of commerce, will prove a link which will bind them together.”

It was in 1868 that Andrew H. Green first dreamed of integrating the areas around New York City into one great metropolis. He argued that the lines of unity had been laid down by nature when it “grouped together in a close indissoluble relation, at the mouth of a great river, our three islands, Manhattan, Long and Staten, making them buttresses and breakwaters of a capacious harbor.”

The improvement of transit facilities gave impetus to his scheme, and a small step toward consolidation was taken in 1874. Three townships in what is now the western Bronx were taken from Westchester County and annexed to New York City. With that one stroke the city nearly doubled its area, jumped the Harlem River for the first time, and pushed north as far as Yonkers. Now the city, from the Battery to Yonkers, was sixteen miles long. In 1895 three other townships—or parts of townships—in the western Bronx were added to the city. These two annexations transferred a total of thirty-nine square miles from Westchester County to New York City.

The part of the city known today as Queens and Staten Island consisted of scattered villages. The situation in Brooklyn was very different. Incorporated as a village in 1816 and as a city in 1834, Brooklyn absorbed the communities of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick in 1855. It took over New Lots in 1866. It added Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Gravesend in 1894. Flatlands, the last township still outside the corporate limits, became part of Brooklyn in 1896. All these gains made Brooklyn the third or fourth largest city in the United States.

Acting on a petition by Andrew H. Green, the state legislature and the governor on May 8, 1890, jointly created “a commission to inquire into the expediency of consolidating the various municipalities of the State of New York occupying the several islands in the harbor of New York.” Green was appointed chairman. He had won a skirmish; but many battles lay ahead, and ultimate victory was far from certain.

Many groups opposed consolidation. The people of Brooklyn preferred their slower pace of life to the frenetic tempo of Manhattan. New York businessmen thought that the addition of undeveloped areas might increase their tax burdens. Upstate Republicans were afraid that a metropolis might dominate the state. Because Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were normally Republican, Tammany fretted lest their inclusion weaken its power.

Green and his colleagues advanced counterarguments. They pointed out that political separation had become a costly and cumbersome anachronism. Brooklyn's government duplicated that of New York. Staten Island and Queens residents suffered from restrictions imposed by small governmental units. Citizens of outlying areas would benefit from consolidation because of lower taxes, lower interest rates on mortgages, more public works, better business opportunities, and increased employment.

For all his logic, Green was able to accomplish little until his cause was taken up by Thomas C. Platt, the Republican boss of the state. Platt's motives remain a mystery. He may have felt that by uniting the Republican strongholds of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, he could bring the enlarged city under permanent Republican control.

In the prolonged drive to create Greater New York the pro and con forces were motivated by a variety of factors—political, economic
, social, sectional, and selfish. Finally, an act of the state legislature, signed into law on May 4, 1897, called for consolidation on January 1, 1898.

This gave the city a new charter. (A charter is to a city what a constitution is to a state.) The city's counties and boroughs were declared to have common boundaries. A county is a political subdivision of a
state.
In New York City a borough is a political subdivision of the
city.
Manhattan became the county and borough of New York; Brooklyn became the county and borough of Kings; the villages lying north of Brooklyn became the county and borough of Queens; the villages of Staten Island became the county and borough of Richmond. Although the Bronx became a city borough in 1898, it did not become a county—the last county created by the state—until 1914.

Each borough could elect its own president. These borough presidents acted as local mayors responsible for some local improvements and administration. Legislative power for the entire city was vested in the sixty-member board of aldermen and the twenty-nine-member city council. Executive power was centralized in the mayor, whose term of office was increased from two to four years. Now came the question, Who would be the first mayor of Greater New York?

Boss Platt picked attorney Benjamin Tracy as the Republican candidate. Tracy, however, was unacceptable to a Republican party faction, which nominated Seth Low, former mayor of Brooklyn. Thus, the anti-Tammany forces were split in the expanded city's first election. Tammany Boss Richard Croker chose an obscure judge, named Robert A. Van Wyck, as the Democratic candidate. Van Wyck was elected the first mayor of Greater New York, and Tammany again vaulted into the saddle.

New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had striven to win the tide of the largest American city. With consolidation, New York City easily won. The new charter trebled the city's area and nearly doubled its population. It increased New York's total population by nearly 126 percent over the figure of the previous decade. New York now had 3,393,252 inhabitants to Chicago's 1,698,575. The city's extreme north-south length was 36 miles. Its maximum east-west breadth was 16½ miles. It contained a total of 320 square miles. The geographical center of the city now lay in northern Brooklyn
200 feet west of Reid Avenue between Van Buren Street and Greene Avenue. Among all the cities of the world New York was second in size only to London.

With the approach of January 1, 1898, the New York
Tribune
exulted: “The sun will rise this morning upon the greatest experiment in municipal government that the world has ever known—the enlarged city.” Of course, some mourned the passing of Littie Old New York. Among these was outgoing Mayor William L. Strong, who suggested holding a “funeral service.” Indeed it began to appear that city officials planned nothing except a stuffy speech or two to celebrate the founding of Greater New York.

Into the vacuum rushed William Randolph Hearst. A city booster when it suited his purposes and addicted to fireworks, Hearst proposed that the
Journal
organize a fete and pay all the costs. Although no city father openly admitted it, Hearst's offer was accepted.
Journal
staff members collected $500 from Tammany Boss Croker, J. Pierpont Morgan, and others, together with smaller sums from average citizens. Hearst himself donated thousands of dollars to bring the total to more than $7,000. Singing societies, military units, bands, civic organizations, marching societies, and bicycle clubs were recruited. Carloads of fireworks were purchased. The
Journal
offered 10 silver loving cups as prizes for the best costume, the best float, and the best of everything among several participating groups. The leader of the Seventh Regiment band set to music an “Ode to Greater New York,” which began: “Hail, thee, city born today,/Commercial monarch by the sea,/Whose throne is by Hudson's way,/‘Mid thousands' homesteads join'd to thee.”

Brooklyn's twenty-eighth and last mayor, Frederick W. Wurster, sat in Brooklyn's City Hall, soon to become Borough Hall, to perform his last official act. He turned over to Greater New York nearly $10,000,000 in Brooklyn funds. With consolidation the annual budget of the expanded city now exceeded $90,000,000. As Wurster sighed and signed, the weather worsened outside his windows. That evening of December 31, 1897, rain began falling. Gradually it turned into wet snow, but this did not dampen the spirits of citizens who gathered at Union Square to march to City Hall for the climactic moment of midnight. Men tippled freely, but the police were indulgent with drunkards on this great occasion. After the procession had got under way and while a horse-drawn float was mushing past the Broadway Central Hotel, at 665 Broadway, exploding fireworks
frightened the horses. They bolted into a band, smashed several instruments, and injured 15 persons. Despite the accident, the celebrants danced through the dank streets to City Hall Park, which glowed in the garish glare of 500 magnesium lights.

As midnight approached, the crowd of 100,000 umbrella-huddling people broke into “Auld Lang Syne.” Exactly at the stroke of 12 their voices hushed, and all waited breathlessly. Mayor James Phelan of San Francisco, sitting in that West Coast city, pressed a button that flicked an electric impulse 3,250 miles to New York City, and sent the new blue and white flag of Greater New York swishing up the staff on the cupola of City Hall. The waiting crowd roared. Near the post office at the southern end of City Hall Park a battery of field guns thundered a 100-gun salute, and skyrockets slashed into the murky heavens. Even the New York
Tribune,
hardly a Hearst admirer, admitted that this was the “biggest, noisiest and most hilarious New Year's Eve celebration that Manhattan Island has ever known.” At long last, on January 1, 1898, at the mouth of the Hudson River, there was created the “imperial city” of which Andrew H. Green had dreamed.

Chapter 37

J. P
IERPONT
M
ORGAN
dealt himself another hand of solitaire and listened for the twentieth century. It was the night of December 31, 1899, and Morgan sat in the library of his Madison Avenue mansion. Logs crackled in the fireplace. To the left of the hearth stood a bookcase holding two metal statues of knights in armor, a clock perched between them. From time to time Morgan may have lifted his dark-hazel eyes to glance at the clock.

The hulking six-foot financier sat at his desk in his usual flat-footed position, toes turned out. With strong and well-formed fingers, he laid out the cards, playing almost automatically, as he did when he had something on his mind. A long cigar protruded from the paper cigar holder clenched in his teeth under his mustache.

Although it was almost midnight in Morgan's mahogany study, it was the high noon of capitalism in America, and no American stood out so starkly as he. Morgan was centralizing the control of industry and credit. He was the capitalist's capitalist. President William McKinley of the large head and barrel torso sat in the White House; but businessmen guided the nation's destiny, and Morgan guided the businessmen. Indifferent to social reform and defiant of public opinion, Morgan felt that he owed the public nothing.